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 re-use for some parts of it. Plus its easier for swipes/gestures, which this app has alot of.

It’s free on the app store, so give it a look here!
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/whatyear/id483562076?mt=8

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.

So I created a simple utility to wrap text for CCLabelBMFont which creates a CCNode with the string. (I actually found some sample code in the cocos2d forums and basically wrote a wrapper and example for it).

Here is what it looks like working(you can toggle between different text to see it working):

It works simply by calling the following and adding the node to your view:

CCNode *messageLabel = [JHMultilineTextUtility multilineNodeText:text lineLength:kLineLength fontFile:kFontFile glyphHeight:kGlyphHeight];
messageLabel.position = ccp(size.width/2, size.height/2);
[self addChild:messageLabel z:1 tag:kTagTextNode];

You can download the source on my github page https://github.com/jeffhodnett/JHMultilineTextUtility

UPDATE: After writing my solution, I found on the cocos2d forum where someone wrote a solution(Thanks Mark!) which is better than mine. You can get the github solution here

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 https://github.com/jeffhodnett/JHBezierTest

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: $16.99

This is an awesome Cocos2d & Box2d scene generator. It really allows you to create physics based levels really really fast! You just drag your sprites in your desired positions and your level is ready. It’s easy to create the different type of physics items in a world like joints. It also has a great built in simulator for you to quickly test your scenes.
Updates for this application are frequent and so there are always some great new features added regularly. It’s also for sale on the Mac App Store here

PhysicsEditor

Url: http://www.physicseditor.de/ Price: $19.95

Edit your physics shapes with ease with this really great tool by Andreas Löw. It allows you to outline your shapes bounding box and then import this data into your game. Really useful for when you have shapes that a not boxes or circles.

TexturePacker

Url: http://www.texturepacker.com/ Price: $19.95

This is another great sprite packing tool, again by Andreas Löw. It has a really nice and simple UI so it’s easy to use, along with great compatibility for exporting to different game engines. It has similar features of the Zwoptex application along with some other minor improvements.

If your not sure weather to get Zwoptex or TexturePacker, have a read of Ray Wenderlich’s Blog Post or Steffen Itterheim’s Blog Post where they outline in more detail what they think is the best.

ParticleDesigner

Url: http://particledesigner.71squared.com/ Price: $7.99

This is an awesome tool for quickly creating particle effects for games by Mike Daley. It’s really useful, allowing you to quickly tweak and preview your particle effect, whereas it would normally be very time consuming messing around with values in code. You can export your finished particle effect so it’s then very easy to add to your game. There is also a community element to this where you can see and use other particle effects submitted by others. A must have!

GlyphDesigner

Url: http://glyphdesigner.71squared.com/ Price: $29.99

This is another great tool by Mike Daley, excellent for creating custom font’s for your game. You can control every aspect of the text rendering process. You can tweak outlines, fills, shadows and even apply gradients. Everything runs in realtime allowing you to see the resulting effect instantly. It’s a little pricey, but totally worth it for the ease of use and great functionality.

Tiled

Url: http://www.mapeditor.org/ Price: FREE

Tiled is an excellent tool for creating tile maps for your games. It allows the quick creation of scenes and is a lot of fun. It supports orthogonal and isometric maps, precision positioning of objects and most importantly allows you to add custom properties to tiles, layers, objects or the map. This means you can associate actions to certain tiles when sprites interact with them.

VertexHelper

Url: https://github.com/jfahrenkrug/VertexHelper Price: FREE

This is another tool similar to PhysicsEditor that helps you map out your custom shapes physical boundaries for your physics game engine. It’s free to download and run and is easy to use. Since you have the source code for this you can dive in an make it look and do whatever you want if you have the know how.

The pro version is for sale on the Mac App Store here.

cfxr

Url: http://thirdcog.eu/apps/cfxr Price: FREE

This is a useful tool for creating sounds in your games. You can manipulate sounds easily and export them to the settings you select.

Please feel free to post links to any more great game tools that you find in the comments section :)

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!

We recently had an issue where we could not get into one of our iMac machines. So what could we do but try to get around the system security.

Here’s how to do it.

1. Press “cmd-s” during startup to get into single user mode

2. Mount the root partition as writable:

$ mount -rw /

3. Remove the hidden .AppleSetupDone file:

$ rm -rf /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

4. Restart your machine

Wow that was easy!!! :)

Now it will take you through the Mac OSX setup, where you can create an admin account. Also note the other accounts will not get deleted, but you will have admin access so you can figure out how to get into those yourself :)