Ramblings from the team at zinc Roe
Archive for the ‘Code’ Category
Posted by Jason on September 12th, 2011
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, [...]
# — Posted in Blog ·Code ·Flash ·Jobs ·iPhone
Posted by Jason on August 29th, 2011
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 [...]
# — Posted in Blog ·Code ·Kids Media ·Projects ·Stella and Sam ·iPad ·iPhone
Posted by Carlo on July 23rd, 2010
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 [...]
# — Posted in Blog ·Code ·Experiments ·Flash ·Research ·Tutorials
Posted by Luke on March 25th, 2010
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 [...]
# — Posted in Blog ·Code ·Tickle Tap Apps ·iPhone
Posted by Luke on June 3rd, 2009
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 [...]
# — Posted in Code ·iPhone
Posted by Luke on May 14th, 2009
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 [...]
# — Posted in Blog ·Code ·iPhone
Posted by Luke on May 14th, 2009
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. [...]
# — Posted in Blog ·Code ·Games ·iPhone
Posted by Luke on May 7th, 2009
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 [...]
# — Posted in Blog ·Code ·Tutorials ·iPhone
Posted by Luke on May 7th, 2009
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 [...]
# — Posted in Blog ·Code ·Tutorials ·iPhone
Posted by Jason on February 9th, 2009
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 [...]
# — Posted in Code ·Projects ·iPhone