the iPhone Developer

Well its been quite some months so I played around with GameSalad so I fired it up to see what has changed. One big thing is support for portrait as well as landscape modes now as it used to support landscape only, not much good for a shooting, top down driving game I think. It also supports iPad but what I was keen to check out is the performance. I downloaded a parallax scrolling demo and put it on my device to see how it would run. Once it loads its ok but it takes a long time to load, you do get an activity indicator but I cant help thinking with lots of sprites on the screen performance will still suffer.

This app takes what I have learned about in-app purchases and talking to web services and wraps it into an amusing little app which lets you send SMS messages to people in your contact list or any mobile number and have it appear from one of 12 defined senders, so in effect its anonymous. Now as it uses an online service there is a charge for sending messages which does *not* come out of your text bundle. Messages are 15p a time and you can top-up credits within the app. Showcase page is here.

What do I use for resources on the web?

Well for any iPhone SDK related questions/issues you should probably start with;

http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/

http://stackoverflow.com/

Next stop check out the iTunesU series on iPhone SDK development from Stanford University.

This was actually an idea from a friend of mine. He and his wife had their first child via IVF so were full of information about conception days when trying for a baby. Now the app store does already have pregnancy calendars but this one also has instructions for the man as it is important that he follows certain instructions during the cycle to increase the chances of conception. Its a fairly simple app comprising of a few UITableViews nothing more. I don’t typically do ‘speculative’ development work as everyone seems to believe they have the next ‘great idea’ for an app but aren’t actually prepared to invest any time or money to see it come to fruition. The app showcase page is here.

In my upcoming app ‘FlirtSMS’ I draw a UIButton in the right hand side of a UITextField. This was working fine on 3.1.3 but now in iOS4 it disappears. Thanks to Sylver over on the iPhoneDevSDKForums as my existing code;

UIButton *button = [UIButton buttonWithType:UIButtonTypeCustom];
[button setImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"add.png"] forState:UIControlStateNormal];
[button setImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"add.png"] forState:UIControlStateHighlighted];
button.imageEdgeInsets = UIEdgeInsetsMake(0, -24, 0, 0);

addContact.rightView = button;
addContact.rightViewMode = UITextFieldViewModeAlways;


Simply needed the following line added;

button.bounds = CGRectMake(0, 0, 35, 32);

Because the bounds of the button are set to zero by default.

In app purchases are a great way to add revenue to your application. Apple also now allow in-app purchases in free apps where once they didn’t. Its not *that* difficult but again I’m all for saving time so I hunted around to see what was on the net that would wrap this functionality. I stumbled across Mugunth Kumar’s excellent MKStoreKit which you can get here.

I did have a couple of small issues. The first is the name of your in-app purchase. I was led to believe this should be in the format;

com.<business name>.<in app purchase item name>

When in fact you dont specify the whole bundle identifier but just the in-app purchase item name. Secondly MKStoreKit is great for one off purchases as it has two flags; FeatureAPurchased and FeatureBPurchased. My in-app purchases were consumable so I simply wired up the delegate to my view controller like so;

[MKStoreManager setDelegate:self];

And then implemented the delegate method;

- (void)productPurchased:(NSString *)productId