• Great cheat sheet for converting games written with XNA 3.1 to XNA 4.0. While this is probably useful mostly for people who were doing game development for the Zune (which is based on XNA 3.1) and now want to port it to Windows Phone 7 (XNA 4.0), it’s also a good cookbook-style list for common operations like “Reset blend and depth write” or “Draw a fullscreen sprite to apply the postprocessing effect.”.
• Great article (accompanied with the source code) on implementing tilt controls on the iPhone properly. I was working on a game in the beginning of 2010 where we had tilt controls and I remember vividly how painful it was to polish them and I don’t think we ever came up with the satisfiable result, I wish I read this article back then.
• Thinking about using Unity for 3D games development for iPhone and other platforms – here’s a good list of all books and tutorials to help you to learn it.
• Popular indie game Canabalt is now open-source. You can grab its source code here, even though the author warns you that the code was re-written from Flash in a record time and it’s a mess
• Good list of all built-in fonts for iPhone and iPad along with all variations – this is an indispensable resource for anyone designing apps for iOS

• Rovio (guys behind the Angry Birds) published the list of handsets that they do not support for the performance reasons. I guess this is a good list and good argument to exclude those handsets from your future games and apps, unless you have a really serious reason for not doing that:
  • Droid Eris
  • HTC Dream
  • HTC Hero
  • HTC Magic/Sapphire/Mytouch 3G
  • HTC Tattoo
  • HTC Wildfire
  • Huawei Ideos/U8150
  • LG Ally/Aloha/VS740
  • LG GW620/Eve
  • Motorola Backflip/MB300
  • Motorola Cliq/Dext
  • Samsung Acclaim
  • Samsung Moment/M900
  • Samsung Spica/i5700
  • Samsung Transform
  • Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini
  • T-Mobile G1
  • And in addition to that they do not support Android OS below 1.6 and custom mods.
• New article on MobileOrchard about Event Framework for iOS. It’s pretty basic, but gives you a good start for using calendar events.
• Guys from 360iDev started to upload new videos from 360iDev:Austin 2010. Those videos are $3.50 a pop, which is a bargain.
  • Colin Donnell – GIT Session
  • Guy English. – Pipeline. Be cheap – waste money
  • Kyle Richter – GameCenter and Beyond
  • Brian Robbins – Building a non-hit driven business. Six months later
  • Brent Simmons – Epic software re-use
  • Joe Keeley – More Quartz 2D More Quartz 2D
• Speaking of Git clients for Mac – here’s another one – Tower. Free, while in beta and looks promising. I think I like it better than GitBox
• Nice hack for those iOS developers, who has to keep multiple versions of iOS SDK and XCode on the same machine (most of us have to do it)
• From the same blog, presentation slides and source code for Advanced AV Foundation features on iOS

• Flash is hardly a mobile development platform (even though you can use it on some platforms), but like Ruby on Rails, I consider Flash an overlapping technology which is very useful for mobile developers to master. Especially if we are talking about game development, where not only quite often you want to build the same game both on mobile and on the web and for the web, it’s almost always Flash, but it’s also very useful for the quick prototyping. So, long story short, here is an interesting game engine for Flash called PushButton engine. It’s developed by guys who were behind TorqueX (very well known “indie” game engine).
• Bunch of articles about Windows Phone 7 Development (XNA) and Box2D.XNA from the new blog EXHD :
  • Varying the Restitution in Box2D.XNA
  • A Totem Prototype using Box2D.XNA for Windows Phone 7
  • Moving or Dragging Objects/Assets Using Box2D and XNA for Windows Phone 7
  • Box2D and XNA for Windows Phone 7 – A Beginner’s Tutorial
  • The Making of The Simple Car using Box2D XNA for WIndows Phone 7
• Interesting Mac app for handling Git repositories – Gitbox.
  
  For Subversion repositories I typically use Versions and this new Gitbox is pretty similar, so I may give it a try. And yes, I can perfectly well work with both SVN and Git from the command line (and I do, quite often), but some things are actually easier and faster with the proper GUI.
• iDeveloper.TV – a video channel for Mac and iOS developers

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.