Snowtel has been released!

Snowtel is a game I've been working on for 18 months and has finally been finished and approved for sale on the app store! It makes extensive use of XML and TBXML!

http://snowtel.co.uk/

My first 2 iPhone apps

I recently set myself the challenge of writing an iPhone app in one day. The first app I made was a simple maths program to help my daughter learn how to add. I managed to complete the entire app in just under 5 and a half hours!

The app is called 1 Plus 2 and is available on the app store today!

View on App Store

More Info

Once this app was finished and uploaded to the App Store, I decided to write another app working off the same principal. My second app is called "My 1 to 5" and helps kids learn their first 5 numbers in a fun and amusing way. My 18 month old daughter loves this app and quite often runs off with my iPhone!

More Info

The app has been submitted and will be available soon

Particle Designer is LIVE

Particle Designer is now LIVE and it has it’s own website. We are really pleased to have finally released the application and we hope that you find it as useful as we do.

As always, we are keen for your feedback and suggestions, so let us know what you think and what you would like to see in the future. We do have a roadmap of features we are scrubbing at the moment and we will share them soon.

Thanks for your support

Mike & Tom

Particle Designer

For the past few weeks, myself and Mike Daley over at 71 Squared have been working on a new project.

The Particle Designer!

This app is a great tool for helping you to develop games for the iPhone. It allows you to customise every aspect of a particle emitter, just by playing with the sliders. The particle emitter updates in real time making it far easier to find the exact style of particle emitter your after.

Mike's put up a post together with a great video showing the off the app.

The app itself has undergone a complete GUI redesign and now has more features since the screen shot above was taken and the video was made, but you'll get the idea.

We hope to get a beta version of the app out by this weekend!

TBXML Performance

I have been meaning to download a number of XML parsers and stuff them all into an app to test out their performance along side TBXML. Fortunately, Ray Wenderlich has recently posted with an app that does exactly this!

He's put together a really good comparison of the different XML parsers available for the iPhone, listing their different features as well as performance comparisons.

It turns out that TBXML is the fastest parser out there. It's even faster libxml2! So if you need to parse a large XML document very quickly, TBXML is the one to choose!

However, libxml2 is a very capable XML parser with some more advanced features than what TBXML is able to offer. It's very important to choose an XML parser based on the requirements of the app your writing.

With TBXML Pro, I will try to add in some of these features while retaining, or increasing the speed at which TBXML runs.

Watch this space...

Learning iPhone Game Programming - Book Review

Mike over at 71 Squared is currently writing a book on "Learning iPhone Game Programming". Most programming books teach you how to perform specific tasks like playing a sound or displaying an image. What separates this book from the rest is that it takes you through the entire development process of designing and writing a game for the iPhone. Everything from tips on how to come up with the initial concept of the game through to performance tuning & beta testing.

Mike's publishers have recently been in contact with me and asked if I'd be interested in reviewing his book. Of corse, I jumped at the chance! It's quite a tight schedule with the deadline being March 16. But on the plus side, the book will be out for you to get your hands on real soon!

The best part (in my opinion) is he's using TBXML to parse XML configurations to set up his tile map and particle emitter classes ;)

Go check out the latest news on this fab book: http://www.71squared.com/2010/02/book-update/

TBXML Pro

I have started work on TBXML Pro!

TBXML Pro will be a chargeable version of TBXML and will contain most of the following features

UTF-16 / UTF-32 Support and Auto Detection
This allows TBXML to correctly decode file formats other than UTF-8 that contain foreign character sets like Chinese characters.


Automatic Class Generation Based on an XML Doc
This will be a tool that you can use to generate a bunch of Objective-C classes for parsing the given XML file. This can be a massive time saver, saving you from the laborious task of writing all the code parse a specific XML layout.

Basic Error Handling
I would like to include some kind of error detection wile parsing a file to help isolate the source of parsing issues.

Built in XML Browser
A built in XML Browser so you can easily browse the contents of an XML file on the iPhone.

Parse XML and return instantiated classes
This will parse an XML file and automatically instantiate a class based on the tag name if it exists. This makes it easier to parse a file as you don't actually need to write any code to parse the XML. Just design a bunch of classes, tell the parser to parse and receive back a load of instantiated classes based on your XML content.


Extensions for specific XML formats like RSS or ATOM
These will consist of a bunch of classes designed to parse a specific XML specification. For instance, if you need to parse an RSS feed, you just need to include the TBXML RSS Extension, give it a URL and display the results. You don't need to know how the RSS specification works inorder to parse and extract the data.


An Assembler Based Core
I may add an optimised core written in pure assembly, just to make TBXML even faster ;)