Recently I started work on an iOS game. I decided not to use the Core Animations framework provided by Apple and instead experiment with some third party game engines. I chose Cocos2D as it is an all in one package. It gives you the ability to add and control sprites, add cool graphics and animations, access to a sound engine and also 2 physics libraries.
Agile project management software. Neat little colored digital cards moving left to right. To do, in progress, done. Backlogs, teams, and burndown charts. Flurries of emails – sometimes useful, sometimes not, often routed to folders and never read.
Up until recently, most of us made exclusive use of feature rich tools like Jira, Pivotal Tracker, or Assembla. If you are a developer, tester, pm, or stakeholder in today’s world, you probably still use one of these tools every day. In fact, you are probably so familiar with your particular task management tool that it seems like a natural extension of your work. A job doesn’t feel done until it’s corresponding card is marked, reassigned, and/or dragged and dropped.
If you have used XCode’s built in unit testing frame work , then you’ve likely hit one of the frustrating points of trying to test your application when making api calls over a network. (I’ll save you some time, and let you know the test dies before the call can finish). That’s not great, but it does not mean you can’t test your application and it’s ability to hit your api.
Recently, I came across a blog from Tanvi, a Mozilla Security Engineer (you can find her on Twitter @TanviHacks) talking about mixed content
If you had read thru Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines, I’m sure you’d notice that it mentioned about how your app should provide a responsive user experience. If the app is processing a lengthy operation, it ought to provide a feedback as suggested by Apple, “Subtle animation can give people meaningful feedback..” Consider this lengthy operation: loading image from a URL. This is a very common task. The problem is, UIImageView doesn’t have a built-in method that lets you load an image and at the same time give you a chance to provide a meaningful UI feedback such as a “subtle animation”.
You might imagine that this subject would be rather straight forward and hardly worthy of an article of any sort. Unfortunately, you would indeed be imagining. Adding an HTML signature to Mac Mail is not as simple as pasting the html directly into the signature field of the client like in Gmail or Outlook. With Apple Mail pasting HTML or images directly into the signature field just doesn’t work very well. In fact, the process for setting an html signature with images in mac Mail is remarkably un-Mac-like.
Being a designer in the tech/web industry, it is very important for me to stay up to date with trends. If you are new to the industry, you might be overwhelmed by the amount of information you find on the Internet.
I would like to share with you a handful of websites I frequently visit to learn as well as to find inspiration.
On my most recent project I was building the client-side of a mobile app. I was a few days ahead of the backend in terms of functionality, but what was really giving me issue was the absence of any kind of test data. Rather than kill my momentum and allow the backend to block my development, I decided to build a quick API “emulator” that would allow the client to perform actions and feed it randomized test data.
Our most recent in house project was a fun children’s game called Whack Attack, and was built with Unity 3D and released for iPhones and android devices. Unity is a great tool, but it is definitely (and obviously) more geared for game crafting in the third dimension. Our game deals mostly with two dimensional sprites, although they are set in a pseudo 3d environment to attain some basic perspective.
On a recent project, we needed a widget that would allow users to select a photo from their Facebook albums. “Surely the new Facebook Android SDK must support this.” I thought. Alas, my hopes were unfulfilled. “Well, I bet there is a third-party solution for this!”, I surmised, but again, my search was for naught. At this point I decided to roll up my sleeves and do it myself.
