Lou Franco is an engineer at Atlassian working on Trello iOS. He has been developing for mobile devices since 2000 and co-authored a book for beginner programmers called “Hello! iOS Development” published by Manning.
Since 1987, the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) has been taking place annually and keeping iOS developers on their toes. Lou Franco watched this year’s event and shares his notes and references in case you missed out.
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Since last year, it has been possible to add Siri support to an app if it fits into one of Apple’s pre-defined use cases. Adding Siri support to an app has a lot of steps, with a lot of configuration. But the code needed to handle the requests is fairly simple. In this article, Lou Franco will take you through the steps of setting up a extension on Apple’s developer website and of adding the Siri extension code to the app. Find out if SiriKit will work for you and how to use it.
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In the past 10 years, a big portion of the Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conferences has been devoted to iOS. This is where we learned about the first iPhone SDK, notifications, share and today widgets, the iOS 7 redesign, iPad multitasking, and other iOS milestones. I was genuinely surprised with some of the announcements this year. In this article, Lou Franco brings you his overview of what happened this WWDC season, with code samples. If you want to try out any of the sample projects, you are going to have to update your Mac to macOS Sierra 10.12.5 (the latest point release), and have Xcode 9 installed.
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Imagine that you get up to get a glass of water, but the exact reason why you did that at that particular time isn’t easy to explain. It was “too hot” and you were “somewhat thirsty,” but also maybe “a little bored.” Each of these qualities isn’t either/or, but instead fall on a spectrum of values. In contrast, software is usually built on Boolean values. You set isHot to true and if isHot && isThirsty && isBored, then you call getWater(). If you use code like this to control your game characters, then they will appear jerky and less natural. In this article, Lou Franco will show you how to add intelligent behavior to the non-player characters of a game using an alternative to conventional Boolean logic.
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Apple’s GameplayKit has several algorithms and data structures that make it easier to follow game development best practices. When you develop a game, you need to sprinkle conditionals everywhere. If Pac-Man eats a power pill, then ghosts should run away. GKRuleSystem, lets you build up complex conditional logic from smaller pieces. By structuring your code around it, you’ll create rules that are easier to change or reuse for new levels. In this article, we’re going to take typical game logic code and learn how to represent it as a rule system.
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With iOS 7’s new Dynamics API, views can be influenced by gravity, attached to each other with springs, and bounced up against boundaries and each other. We’re used to objects in games feeling real. To get this effect, game designers use a physics engine that treats the elements as bodies in a simulation and that uses Newton’s laws of motion to calculate how they move over time. In using the engine, designers specify an object’s bounciness, its density, the level of gravity, and how things are attached to each other. In iOS 7, Apple made that technology available to UIKit-based apps as well.
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