zinc Roe is looking for freelance developers to work with us on upcoming projects. We develop websites, games and apps for children. We build things that we are happy to share with our kids, nieces, nephews and neighbours. Our developers are very talented and enjoy applying these talents to build games and activities that delight, [...]
From the outset we knew we wanted our Stella and Sam Apps to fully support English and French and be built in such a way that we could accommodate additional languages in the future. Colin promptly dug into Apple’s docs on how to support localization and did a survey to see how other app developers [...]
When using the webcam in your flash applications, it can be handy to flip the video object so it acts like a mirror. Many of the flash webcam demos out there does exactly this, usually by setting the scaleX property of the video object to -1. Unfortunately, because the registration point of the video object [...]
While debugging our new Tickle Tap Toddler Pack iPhone app, I had to fix a couple of obscure bugs caused by the YouTube video on the app’s info screen. After watching the video, none of the sound effects in Sound Shaker work and Field Flier just displays a blank white screen… very strange. After a [...]
While coding the sound for Arctic Shuffle 2, I ran into a non-obvious memory (to me, anyway) memory leak related to the AVAudioPlayer that took forever to track down. Here was my original code, which leaks if an error occurs in the initWithData:error: method: – (AVAudioPlayer *)audioPlayerWithContentsOfFile:(NSString *)path { NSData *data = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:path]; return [...]
For the next version of Arctic Shuffle, we’re using Open GL to speed things up. One problem we’re run into along the way is strange artifacts in textures smaller than 64 pixels by 64 pixels. After a lot of head scratching, an obscure forum post saved the day. It turns out there’s a bug in [...]
There were some good questions during my presentation last night and via email this morning about units in Box2D. @jasonkrogh asked what kind of units Box2D uses. Here’s the relevant bit about units from the Box2D manual: Box2D works with floating point numbers, so some tolerances have to be used to make Box2D perform well. [...]
Now that we’re knee deep in iPhone game development, we’re working with a number of different outside developers. Since everyone involved is pretty new to Objective-C, XCode and iPhone development, project organization and coding conventions in our projects have been all over the map. To improve the quality of our projects and make them easier [...]
Using Box2D is a great way to add physics to a 2D iPhone game. Since Box2D is written in C++ rather than Objective-C, adding it to your XCode project and getting it to build cleanly can be a bit tricky. If you just want to get aquainted with Box2D, there is an sample XCode project [...]
We’re very excited about our early experiments with iPhone development. Today we are submitting our very first app to the App Store. Timecoder is a super-simple time code calculator, an idea that came to us from our super-talented video editor Kyle Sim. There is much more to come, but we are excited to make it this [...]