Simple Maze Game Part 2 – Using Accelerometer

May 18, 2013 By 2 Comments

Editor’s note: This is part 2 of our simple Maze game series. We’ll continue to work on the maze game and you’ll learn how to interact with iPhone’s accelerometer.

In the first part of the maze game tutorial, we set up all the elements needed for the game and we wrote the code to animate the ghost characters. In the second part we are going to show you how to use the accelerometer for moving the pacman.

The iPhone’s built-in accelerometer has created tons of opportunities for iOS developers to create innovative and fun games. It is not uncommon you can find apps that allow user to control a game character by tilting an iPhone. And that’s what we’re going to do with our maze game. In this tutorial, we will give you a brief introduction of accelerometer, cover how to get access to the motion data by using the Core Motion framework and make the pacman move.

Maze Game Part 2

Let’s get started.
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Creating a Simple Maze Game for iPhone – Part 1

May 13, 2013 By 11 Comments

Editor’s note: After we published the animation tutorial a few weeks ago, we got quite a lot of requests about publishing a complete game tutorial. This week, Rafael will show you how to write a simple Maze game using the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer.

This is our first tutorial about developing an iPhone game. In the next series of tutorials we are going to learn how to create a simple Maze game. In this game players have to guide a pacman-like figure to navigate through a maze and find the exit, while avoiding to collide with any moving ghosts. For the navigation, The user will guide the pacman with the aid of the iPhone’s accelerometer.

As the app is a little bit complex and we have to introduce several programming frameworks, we will split the game tutorial into three parts:

  • In this first part we’ll set up all the required elements of the game such as designing the maze and animating the obstacles.
  • For the second part, we’ll cover the accelerometer and show you how to move the pacman.
  • In the last part of tutorial, you’ll learn how to detect collisions.

Simple Maze Game
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Create a Simple App for Video Recording and Playback

April 30, 2013 By 2 Comments

In the previous post we covered how to create a simple camera app. In this post, we’re going to create a similar application but for video recording and playback.

The iOS API for recording and playing videos can be a little bit confusing for the newcomer, as there are several options available. If you just want to play a video, you can use the MediaPlayer framework, which allows us to play a video stored locally in our device, or from a remote location. However, if you need advanced features such as media asset management, media editing, track management, and others, you have to use the AVFoundation framework. This post will only cover the MediaPlayer framework.

On top of that, the MediaPlayer framework brings us two main classes to display videos or movies. If you want to display a video immediately and inline (e.g. a subview smaller than the full screen), you should use the MPMoviePlayerController. By using MPMoviePlayerController, playback occurs in a view owned by the movie player. You can incorporate a movie player’s view into a view owned by your app. On the contrary, if you want to play a full screen video, for example by presenting the video modally, you should use the MPMoviePlayerViewController class. The MPMoviePlayerViewController class is designed to present a simple view controller for displaying full-screen movies.

In this tutorial, we will explain the MPMoviePlayerController but similar concept applies to the MPMoviePlayerViewController class.

Simple Video App Tutorial

Simple Video App Tutorial


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Build a Simple Camera App Using UIImagePickerController

April 22, 2013 By 7 Comments

Previously, we covered how to use the built-in APIs to read a RSS feed and build a simple RSS Reader app. In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to use the built-in camera of the iPhone (or the iPod or iPad, if they have one) to take a photo. Also, we’ll see how to access the internal photo library and allow user to pick a photo. The iOS library provides the class UIImagePickerController which is the user interface for managing the user interaction with the camera or with the photo library. As usual, the UIImagePickerController requires the use of a delegate to respond to interactions.

To help you understand the usage of UIImagePickerController, we’ll build a simple camera app. The example application is very simple: we will have a main window with a big UIImageView to show the selected photo, and two buttons: one to take a new photo, and the other one to select a photo from the photo library.

A simple camera app tutorial

A simple camera app tutorial


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How to Create a Simple RSS Reader App

April 13, 2013 By 15 Comments

Editor’s note: we received a number of requests for a tutorial about building a RSS reader app. This week, Rafael Garcia Leiva will show you how to create a simple iPhone app to consume a RSS feed. Rafael is a senior iPhone developer author of more than a dozen applications. Currently he works as freelancer developing iPhone applications and teaching introductory and advanced courses about iPhone programming. When away from a keyboard Rafael spends his time on the mountains with his wife and three children.

Enter the RSS Reader tutorial.

In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to create a simple RSS reader application. The app will be based on a master / detail design, where the master view will display the list of available feeds, and the detail view will show the corresponding web pages.

Simple RSS Reader Tutorial

Simple RSS Reader Tutorial


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iOS Programming 101: Simple Animation Using UIImageView

March 31, 2013 By 9 Comments

As you may know, we have released our first iOS game on App Store. Honestly, we do not have any game development experience. As we always said, “getting your hands dirty is the best way to learn programming”.

We started out by developing a simple memory game. We’re sure that it won’t be a big hit. However, it’s a great learning experience even the game do not generate good money. In coming tutorials, we’ll share with you some of the implementation techniques such as game center integration, in-app purchase implementation, Nextpeer integration for multiplayer support, etc. To start off, let’s see how you can use UIImageView to implement simple animation.

simple animation
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Create Static Table View Using Storyboard

March 20, 2013 By 9 Comments

After we published the iCloud programming tutorial, the first question from our readers is not about iCloud but related to the static table view. If you’ve followed our tutorials, you should have a basic understanding about table view. However, the table views that we’ve covered are of dynamic content. The “Add Note” controller that we built in the previous tutorial, on the other hand, makes use of the static table view. If you have problem with static table view, this tutorial is for you. We’ll show you how to create static table view using Storyboard.

To illustrate how easy you can use Storyboard to implement static table view, we’ll build a simple Setting screen. Static table views are ideal in situations where a pre-defined number of data items to be displayed. A setting screen is an obvious use of static table view.

Static Table View Demo App
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iOS Programming with iCloud: An Introduction

March 11, 2013 By 13 Comments

Editor’s note: This week, we work with Ziad Tamim again to give you an introduction of iCloud programming. You’ll learn how to save and retrieve data from iCloud.

In this tutorial we are going to talk about iCloud, one of the new features introduced in iOS 5. From user’s perspective, iCloud is a simple feature that allows the access of personal information from all devices wirelessly and automatically via an Apple ID. As an developer, you can use the iCloud API in the iOS SDK to integrate iCloud service in your app.

What is iCloud

Basically, iCloud is a service that helps user synchronize the data across devices. The main purpose is to let users easily put their data, whether it’s a file or document, so that they can access the data on any of their iOS devices. While you can use other cloud services for saving file or data, the core idea behind iCloud is to eliminate explicit synchronization between devices. Apple do not want users to think of the cloud servers and the syncing. Everything simply works seamlessly.

The same design philosophy also applies to developers. When you adopt iCloud, you do not need to know how to interact with the cloud server or upload data to iCloud. The iOS handles all the heavy lifting. Your focus is on the content such as managing the change of data.

iCloud Intro

How iCloud works


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iOS Programming 101: Record and Play Audio using AVFoundation Framework

February 27, 2013 By 10 Comments

Editor’s note: Some of you asked us to write a tutorial about audio recording. This week, we work with Yiqi Shi and Raymond from Purple Development to give you an introduction of AVFoundation framework. Yiqi and Raymond are independent iOS developers and have recently released Voice Memo Wifi that allows users to record voice memo and share it over WiFi.

iOS provides various framework to let you work with sound in your app. One of the frameworks that you can use to play and record audio file is the AV Foundation Framework. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the basics of the framework and show you how to manage audio playback, as well as, recording.

To provide you with a working example, I’ll build a simple audio app that allows users to record and play audio. Our primary focus is to demonstrate the AV Foundation framework so the user interface of the app is very simple.

The AV Foundation provides easy ways to deal with audio. In this tutorial, we mainly deal with these two classes:

  • AVAudioPlayer – think of it as an audio player for playing sound files. By using the player, you can play sounds of any duration and in any audio format available in iOS.
  • AVAudioRecorder – an audio recorder for recording audio

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Handling Single and Multiple Selection in Collection View

February 18, 2013 By 9 Comments

In the past two tutorials, we covered the basics of UICollectionView and header/footer customization. You should already know how to display items using UICollectionView. However, we haven’t covered how to interact with the collection view cell.

As mentioned before, the Collection View works in a way pretty much like Table View. But to give you a better idea, we’ll show how to interact with the collection items such as the ways to handle single and multiple item selection. To provide you with a working example of how the item selection works, we’ll continue to improve the Recipe app. Here are what we’re going to implement:

  1. To demonstrate how you can handle single selection, we’ll improve the Recipe app. When user taps a recipe photo, the app will bring up a modal view and display the photo in larger size.
  2. We’ll also implement Facebook sharing in the app in order to show you multiple item selection. Users are allowed to select multiple photos and share them on Facebook.

Recipe App Multiple Selection

The interface of the app is very simple and will not win any design award. However, it’ll give you an idea of how to interact with collection view. To spare you from setting up the Xcode project, you can download this Xcode template. Please note that the Xcode project is created using Xcode 4.6 and tested on iOS 6. If you find any problem opening/compiling the project, please upgrade your Xcode to the latest version.
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