71-Squared: iPhone Game Programming – Tutorial 1

I came across a wonderful series of iPhone Game Programming by 71² and it is outstanding. Source code is also available at the official post. For beginners, this is the series you should probably start with. Thanx 71² team.

iPhone Game Programming – Tutorial 1 from Michael Daley on Vimeo.

Happy iPhone Game Programming

Another Gold Medalist in family !!!

My little brother Rana Omer Hussain, received Gold Medal from Governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, at the convocation of Punjab University. It’s an honor for my family to have another Gold Medalist in family. I received Gold Medal but I was 3rd in my batch but my brother stood 1st in his batch, so this is the real Gold Medal in our family.

I wish my brother Best of Luck for his future plans. May Allah bless him and give him success in every aspect of life and hereafter. Ameen.

We both then had our photo together for memories…

Google Translator

In one of my posts, I received a comment in some other language and wordpress marked it as spam; but I thought for a second and just being curious what is written in the comment, I selected a word from that comment and searched it in Google. I got an idea that it is a Russian word. Then the remaining task was easy, I opened translate.google.com and translated that comment into English from Russian, and it turned out great………………The person was praising my blog and if I had not translated it, I might have treated it as spam and deleted it………………

Lesson learned is if you see any text in different language, don’t neglect it; use translate.google.com and you might find that text useful.

Happy Translating

TellMyStory 1.0

Our application which has been in Apple’s review pool since 27th April 2009 has been approved and is now available at App Store on 9th August 2009. At last it’s accepted and is available for everyone out there.

TellMyStory is not an ordinary application. It is a serious application for sharing thoughts and images with friends on the run. This application can be used in almost all domains, e.g. this can be used by a reporter; to take snapshots of an important event, record sounds of those event or add verbal/textual comments and send the slideshow instantly to newspaper/magazine editor. This application can also be used for entertainment purposes; people can share their visits, their feelings, their emotions instantly with their friends. They can go to football match for example, capture snapshots , add crowds noise, add comments and share the football craze with their football fanatic friends…………….these are just basic examples, TellMyStory can be used in almost all aspects of daily life.

I have enjoyed a lot developing it. I have used it many times in couple of wedding functions by taking snapshots, applying Ken Burns, adding background music and by recording different sounds. I was quite successful in surprising other people with this quick compiling of real time images and playing them in a slideshow. I enjoyed it and I hope that everyone will enjoy it in their own ways. The learning curve of this application is hardly 15-30 minutes. When my 14 year brother saw this application, he was very interested, he started taking snapshots and adding music and came to me to ask only one thing which was how do I move/scale the images………..he was asking about how to apply the Ken Burns effect and I showed him the steps and there he was. He starting making shows with different effects and funny sound effects and the rest is history. Our chairperson’s daughter came up with a show which is now added as a default story in the application. This is just to inform everyone that making a story is very easy and interesting.

It took about 3 months for development, about a month for quality assurance and about 2 months for desiging in parallel. The main image also changed with the passage of developement. The one above is the released one, a couple of other Default images are:

The application TellMyStory can be downloaded from this link: TellMyStory.

Thank you Vahzay iPhone Team for making the dream come true.

iTouchBall 1.0

Here we go!

We developed a simplest game for iPhone and iPod Touch devices. The game is very easy to learn and master. The game is available at App Store. Please download and give a good rating. This might help my company to get some service oriented work

It can be downloaded from here.

The life cycle of the development of iTouchBall is as follow:
Our iPhone Application Development team worked on an application for about 4 months and at last it was sent to Apple for review and unfortunately it is still in review process. Our management lost hope for further development in iPhone, but then I came up with a simple game which had a ball bouncing off the walls or your finger. Then we were given another chance by our management to modify the game and get it ready in 2 weeks.

The first idea was to modify the game into a game in which there is a moving ball with higher radius which bounces off the walls and if player touches the ball it divides into 2 and so on, until all balls are eliminated from the screen. In first week, this game was completed. Levels were introduced and in each level the number of divisions increased. Simple graphics were used.

Now when we played the game, it was very monotonous. We  scheduled a meeting with our management and informed them that we need to rethink the game design, level designs and come up with some addictive game but we were not given any extra day. We were pushed to reach the already set deadline. So we modified the game. We restricted the number of divisions, increased the speed in every level. We named the developed game Eliminator and added a functionality of merging together. We developers, ourselves, introduced another game Protector where player will have to protect the ball from hitting the screen walls. After completing the games, we added the score comparison thing, so that every player around the world can see what is the highest score ever made in particular game. In 2 weeks, we were done with the game. Due to lack of interest from our management, we did not even push our graphic designer to come up with any fascinating graphics. He tried his best to come up with the current ones and we appreciated his effort because he is not game graphics designer, he has his expertise in designing graphics for websites which is totally a different domain. Our QA department spent about 3-4 days on the game and then we submitted it to Apple. We got a couple of genuine issues from Apple and we fixed them and resubmitted it. With in a weeks time after last submission, we received an email from Apple that it has been launched.

No hard feelings but we need to be patient in doing everything. It is good to have an application at App Store but we know that we have the capabilities to make 150% times better game than this. There are hell lot of things you can do with a ball moving around the screen. But still, lets see what reviews does this simple game receives. I will be working my brains out to come up with a game which will be more presentable, logical, exciting and addictive than iTouchBall. For the time being, I feel proud that we have atleast something on App Store. Cheers!

Game Development in iPhone using Cocos2d

A couple of days back, I got a chance to explore Cocos2d and I found it very useful and easy to understand if you want to jump into Game Development for iPhone. I would suggest all newbies to go through the white paper by Monocle Studios which gives an introduction of how to convert your project into Cocos2d environment. Its been fun and I hope everyone will like it. Lets hope I come up with couple of games of my own too

Happy iPhone Development

Apps Amuck – 31 Days Tutorial of iPhone App Development

I came across this great and helpful site AppsAmuck and it contains 31 sample codes for 31 days. A new bee can start iPhone Application Development from here. Nice work by Apps Amuck Team. Keep it up!

Happy iPhone Development

Nowtees

Last year, I submitted a T-Shirt Design in Nowtees, and yesterday I received a letter from them that they have accepted my design. I signed an agreement, according to which my design is the property of Nowtees but they will put my name as designer in T-Shirt’s tag. I said to myself, why not? I designed it to submit at Nowtees, otherwise I would have never designed it, so it’s theirs

As soon as the T-Shirt comes in market, I’ll upload picture of that too. This incident has made me believe that we must try our best in all those areas which are in our range and Allah will give us positive results when we need them most. No doubt, God works in mysterious ways. Thanks Allah Almighty.

[iPhone] Program exited with status value 101

My application had a UITableView with about more than 250 rows and when I scrolled through it completely twice or thrice; the application CRASHED and a line appeared at my application’s status bar that “Program exited with status value: 101″. I ran the application in Leaks tool from Instruments option in XCode. It did not show any leaks, but then again application crashed and I received same message on my status bar of application, i.e. “Program exited with status value: 101″.

After a lot of googling, I found that status 101 indicates that there is a memory issue; meaning that no more memory was available for the application. The application did not crash because of any memory leak, but it crashed due to too much memory allocations…sounds logical. So I optimized my code of populating the cells and voila, the application lived happily ever after and did not crash

[iPhone] Learning OpenGL ES for iPhone Application development

This week, after completing our first application, I was given permission to explore and learn openGL ES for iPhone Application Development. This has been a great week and I have come across various forums and tutorial sites. I am thinking to keep my blog updated with all the steps I am taking in exploring graphics programming in iPhone. So here is the first post. I came across this blog post via iPhoneDevelopmentBits. The post is very resourceful and the first link I visited is iPhone OpenGL ES Series.

This post is for those, who don’t know where to start graphics programming in iPhone. Happy iPhone Coding