Been doing alot of research of late into data plans for the iPad. It’s pretty overwhelming the amount of options out there! It’s useful to have data on the go as WiFi is not available as much as it is in the States. The best one i have found so far is this one from O2. It seems to meet my data and cost requirements for my iPad. Anyways, hope this is helpful to someone!

Came across this interview question somewhere recently, thought it would be fun to share it to see if people can get it (it’s easy really!) Here is a series of numbers. What is the next number in the sequence? 1 11 21 1211 111221 312211 13112221 I’ll post the answer in the comments if people are struggling, but it should be easy! :)

Knocked this app together pretty quickly and released it last week(will be adding an update with better animations). It’s a cool iPhone game to play with your friends. It’s a quiz game where the only answers are years. It’s very easy to play, so people of all ages can play it! I actually used UIKit to create this app, I was thinking of doing it in cocos2d at the start, to make some nice animations. But in the end the timeline for this project was extremely tight, so ended up using UIKit because i had some code that i could [...]

Introducing the Opuss app! Opuss is a new service that i’ve been working on with Adam Neilson(@adamneilson) and Chris Knight(@chrisknight2) for the past 2 or so months. It’s a new and exciting way to read, write and share all the best words in the World. http://www.opuss.com Here are some screens of how it looks! You can also post content through Twitter and Facebook whereby you get a beautiful webpage to view Opuss content! Like this! It’s free on the app store so give it a try!

Been pretty busy of late since finishing in my previous job, have been working on a startup idea that hopefully people will use, so will be updating the world about it very soon :) Will also be posting a ton of iOS code that i have to share with lots of custom controls and what not!

I quickly created this utility today, so it might be useful to anyone. It’s a singleton to just display popups on the top of the window. Useful and can be made to look alot nicer than UIAlertViews. You can download it here: https://github.com/jeffhodnett/JHNotificationManager (Keep in mind you can do alot with the graphics and UIView being displayed, so this is really just an example, it’s up to you to be creative with how it displays stuff!)

I was working with displaying dynamic multiline text in cocos2d recently and had to come up with a solution for this. With CCLabel it has a ‘dimensions’ field in its init method, allowing you to constrain the size of the text like so. NSString *fontName = @”Helvetica”; float fontSize = 18.0f; UIFont *font = [UIFont fontWithName:fontName size:fontSize]; NSString *message = @”whatever”; CGSize textSize = [message sizeWithFont:font constrainedToSize:CGSizeMake(self.contentSize.width, CGFLOAT_MAX) lineBreakMode:UILineBreakModeWordWrap]; CCLabel *textLabel = [CCLabel labelWithString:text dimensions:textSize alignment:UITextAlignmentCenter fontName:fontName fontSize:fontSize]; This is cool, but generally it’s better to use custom fonts with CCLabelBMFont. However there is no handle for this in CCLabelBMFont. [...]

I was working with cocos2d CCBezierTo and CCBezierBy animations recently(read this if you don’t know what bezier curves are) and was getting annoyed because stuff wasn’t doing what i expected it to. So i wrote a little helper project for me to see what bezier paths my sprites will take based on the two control points and the end point, so am sharing it with everyone. The app looks as follows, with the points clearly named and the ability to drag them around to preview animations in real time. You can download the project on my github page at

A quick post on some excellent game development tools that i use daily. These really are the industry standard for iOS game development and make life so much easier, so just buy them already!! Zwoptex Url: http://zwoptexapp.com/ Price: $15.00 This is such a great sprite packing tool, really simple and just works! It allows you to get the maximum amount of sprites into an image, by use of some clever algorithms. Alternatively you can manually position sprites too. It also allows you to export the sprite positional info to many various game engines(including my fav cocos2d). LevelHelper Url: http://www.levelhelper.org/ Price: [...]

If you’ve downloaded the most recent version of Cocos2d(0.99.5) and are using Xcode4 there is a small issue when trying to build the Box2d testbed app. Here is how I found to fix it: Select the box2d target(shown after selecting the project in the project navigator). I found that the box2d library target needed this setting changed: GCC 4.2 Code Generation line – Symbols hidden by default – needs to be “YES” That should work then!