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...