First of all – Happy Thanksgiving to Everyone.

I was on the short (2 days) vacation and did some catch-up on my 7000+ Read It Later items (long story…), so some links will be fresh and some maybe a little bit stale, but I hope still very useful.

• I started to read an article “Universal applications asset naming conventions, directory structure and macros”, which mentions 3 other articles related to the same topic, so now after reading them all I think I have a pretty comprehensive understanding of the different ways to include resources into your XCode project and their respective pros and cons. Highly recommended to all iOS game developers or even app developers in case if you’re dealing with substantial amounts of resources or need to support building iPhone and iPad apps from a single code base
  • Games, Resources, And XCode
  • Xcode Folder References
  • Xcode resource groups and folder references when building for iPhone
• Not really mobile-related, but a very good tool nevertheless and can be useful in mobile projects – PlantUML. Allows to build a cool looking UML diagrams, based on very simple text-based format. Here’s some samples:
  
  

  @startuml img/classes05.png class Object << general >> Object <|--- ArrayList   note top of Object : In java, every class\nextends this one. note "This is a floating note" as N1 note "This note is connected\nto several objects." as N2 Object .. N2 N2 .. ArrayList @enduml

• And a similar tool for a generic diagrams – ditaa. Converts ASCII art into pretty pictures.

+--------+ +-------+ +-------+ | | --+ ditaa +--> | | | Text | +-------+ |diagram| |Document| |!magic!| | | | {d}| | | | | +---+----+ +-------+ +-------+ : ^ | Lots of work | +-------------------------+

After conversion using ditaa, the above file becomes:

• Good short tutorial on Mobile Orchard about how to use UIImagePicker. Nothing fancy, but gives you a good start. On the side note, I really wish Mobile Orchard to come back – it was super-useful (almost like iDevBlogADay right now) about a year ago, but then Dan Grigsby decided to quit iOS development and stopped updating the site. It was recently sold to some other people, who started to recover it, but right now the quality of articles is very uneven, ranging from good, useful developer-oriented articles that made Mobile Orchard into its glory to simple app reviews, which are less interesting for the audience (at least in my humble opinion).
• Ray Wenderlich continues to deliver high-quality content, this time it’s “How to Create and Optimize Sprite Sheets in Cocos2D with Texture Packer and Pixel Formats”. Must read if you’re using Cocos2D

Ok, that’s all for today, but I should have more stuff tomorrow.