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    iOS developers...

    Anyone here done any iOS development? I have other questions but I'll start with that for now :-)

    #2
    Yep. I made Wonton 51 with a friend. I'm not a coder but I can tell you how we made the game and released it.

    Fire away!

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      #3
      Wow, that looks like radirgy.

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        #4
        Yeah, the art ended up being bright and colourful after an age of me trying different things. First stab at doing proper art for a game as well. Not great but looks ok!

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          #5
          I work in a team who make iOS apps so... fire away and I'll see what I can answer
          Lie with passion and be forever damned...

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            #6
            Originally posted by chopemon View Post
            Yeah, the art ended up being bright and colourful after an age of me trying different things. First stab at doing proper art for a game as well. Not great but looks ok!
            Looks great! So much talent on this forum.

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              #7
              Cool. I'm making an ipad app but I don't want to use all the normal tools like storyboards, wiring up connectors etc. I just want to do the whole thing programmatically. It doesn't look like this is a problem but just wondered if I'm headed for trouble down the line?

              That's all for now. Thanks!

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                #8
                I learnt iOS development pre-storyboards, but use them whenever possible nowadays. It IS useful to know the alternate methods because storyboards can't do everything... in fact for pretty much every app that doesn't have a completely vanilla look you have to tweak the code in some arcane manner. Not talking about games ofc.

                BUT in my opinion you'd be mad to handle it all that way: any new features are going to be designed, taught, documented, etc with modern xcode components in mind. Searching for old code snippets is only going to find you old stackoverflow answers, so you'll just be making it harder for yourself. You'll also end up with pre-ARC answers, which is a whole can of worms.

                It is possible of course, and all the modern features work in code - you'll just have little background info to draw from, except for the official docs.

                Why would you want to do it? You can prototype a whole app in an hour using storyboards, then get on with the real (fun) task of making it work properly, and look good.

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                  #9
                  Thanks for the replies chaps.

                  I'm not bothered about seeing examples and stuff. TBH Xcode is pretty awesome at letting you know when you haven't implemented an interface or a method and Apple's docs are pretty good these days. I was more concerned that there were actual features hidden away that wouldn't be available to me but it seems that's not the case. Many years ago I found that using the Interface Builder was prone to error and when something went wrong you had to go and look at the generated code anyway so I figured I may as well just do the whole thing like that. It's coming along ok at the moment anyway.

                  Next question:

                  Developing for multiple resolutions. We're thinking hi-res PNGs and just render them scaled down on lower res devices. Good or bad idea?
                  Last edited by Brad; 09-11-2013, 19:38.

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                    #10
                    Not based on iOS experience but from general mobile development there's two issues with making the UI image based:

                    1) Doesn't handle different aspect ratios very tidily.

                    2) The scaling can introduce nasty artefacts, like when downscaling you can get some ugly interference on fine details which makes text look particularly bad, especially if it's got a thin contrasting outline. Rendering it natively also gives you access to anti-aliasing so you'll always get a smooth looking product.

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                      #11
                      Hmmmm, though that would be too good to be true. So, my options are either multiple (currently just 2) images per item or... what? Render vectors?

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                        #12
                        Originally posted by FSW View Post
                        Developing for multiple resolutions. We're thinking hi-res PNGs and just render them scaled down on lower res devices. Good or bad idea?
                        Or start with vector based images and export them to PNG. Same for the app icon: Apple changes the required upload image res quite often, so having vector sources is a benefit.

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                          #13
                          Originally posted by FSW View Post
                          Hmmmm, though that would be too good to be true. So, my options are either multiple (currently just 2) images per item or... what? Render vectors?
                          Again this isn't iOS based, but on other platforms what I've done is:

                          -Used background artwork that doesn't feature close contrasting bands and let it be scaled and then cropped for the aspect ratio.
                          -Then for UI elements created a manager class that has various setups for different aspect ratios, which then adjusts the empty spacers between various UI elements or applies scaling factors to particular portions to accommodate narrower or wider displays. Then the font size is scaled based on the pixel counts within the respective areas as outlined by the scratch area the manager assigns it. That said sometimes it's necessary to make alterations based on the physical dimensions of the device as queried at runtime (you don't want user interactive elements too small), but if you're just doing iOS and not worrying about Android that won't be an issue. Then for button/font backings I use vector based constructs that can be scaled in line with the scaled text.

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                            #14
                            Thanks again chaps. We're iOS only (doubt we'll ever port to Android, as much as I like the platform) and it seems Apple provide a nice bit of help to make life easy, to the point that in the last couple of hours the retina/non-retina issue has become a non-issue :-)

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