Tag: Software Development
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H@PPY N3W Y3@2 2015!
My Resolutions for 2015 Contribute to an open source project Write a mobile app every month Master VIM, GIT, and Make Read all of Focus’ suggested computer science papers at least once 🙂 Write ALL the tests first! Roar! Buy and read books printed on paper! I’ll post weekly updates!
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Cocos2D-Swift 3.0: A great way to get started developing iOS games!
If you’re new to iOS game development now is a great time to get started. In 2008 a brilliant engineer named Ricardo Quesada rewrote his 2D game engine for Apple’s iOS and released it as open source. It’s no exaggeration to say that hundreds of games, like my own, were developed using Cocos2D-including dozens of…
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Sprite Kit, Retina, iOS7 and Getting It Right
I spent more time that I care to admit figuring out how to reconcile my old Dungeonators code with Apple’s Sprite Kit, Retina displays, and iOS 7. Along the way I searched the web for help and ran into tons of tutorials and advice for indy game developers (I highly recommend www.raywenderlich.com for a…
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Getting Xcode and GitHub to work together like besties
Updated for Xcode Version 7.3.1 Thanks to Jake for pointing out that his blog post needed a little freshening up! After watching the WWCD keynote I wanted to fool around in Cocoa and Objective-C again. It’s been a while and my Xcode skills were rusty. One task that always seems tricky is getting Xcode’s…
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Everyone should learn to code
I was on a HuffPost Live segment and got a chance to discuss why learning to code is something everyone should do! Movement Grows To Cultivate Computer Programming And I have two HuffPost blog posts talking about coding and drawing and why you should learn to do both.
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Opps! Errors in Google’s Chrome Extension Tutorials
I don’t know why, but I got interested in writing a Chrome Extension. Yeah, I know, like 3 years too late. I figured it would just take an hour and I might learn something about well designed plug and play component architecture. I quickly found the Getting Started tutorial. The screen shots were a bit…
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HyperCard: What Made it Leet
I posted a blog entry on HyperCard yesterday on The Huffington Post: HyperCard: The Original Bridge Over the Digital Divide. From the comments and tweets that I got it was pretty clear that us older hackers have fond memories of HyperCard. But there’s the rub–Us older hacker. Kids today, i.e., people in their twenties, missed…
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ARC Memory Management in iOS 5 and Cocos2d-iPhone 2.0
My rewrite of Dungeonators is crawling along at a glacial pace. Mostly because I can only work a couple of hours a week on the project. But the iOS 5 way to manage memory with ARC (automated reference counting) is making the process far less painful than it was the first time I wrote my…
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When Dogfooding Fails
For over 20 years we’ve been eating our own dog food in the software industry and it’s not working. For the uninitiated dogfooding means to actually use the product you’re developing. It started out as a radical idea at Microsoft and spread as a way to get developers to experience their customer’s pain. On the…
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Fraction: Does not recognize selector forward::
If you’re crazy like me you love reading really good primers on programming. Not just to learn about a particular language but to enjoy well written technical prose. (Yeah, I said I was crazy). Yesterday, I started reading Stephen Kochan’s classic Programming in Objective-C (original edition), which was published in 2003. What I like about…