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. Find out if SiriKit will work for you and how to use it.
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Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) has been running for 34 years, which is 6 years longer than The Simpsons. Like Netflix, Apple likes to drop a whole season at once. When it does, I devote that week and the following weekend to binge-watching as many videos as I can and trying out some of the new technology, especially as it relates to iOS.
In the past 10 years, a big portion of these 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.
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Imagine that it’s a hot day. The sun is out, and the temperature is rising. Perhaps, every now and then, there’s a cool breeze. A good song is playing on the radio. At some point, 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, our software is usually built on Boolean values. We set isHot to true and if isHot && isThirsty && isBored, then we call getWater(). If we use code like this to control our game characters, then they will appear jerky and less natural. In this article, we’ll learn how to add intelligent behavior to the non-player characters of a game using an alternative to conventional Boolean logic.
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When you develop a game, you need to sprinkle conditionals everywhere. If Pac-Man eats a power pill, then ghosts should run away. If the player has low health, then enemies attack more aggressively. If the space invader hits the left edge, then it should start moving right.
Usually, these bits of code are strewn around, embedded in larger functions, and the overall logic of the game is difficult to see or reuse to build up new levels.
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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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