Rogueship: space trading game for the iPhone released

Rogueship is a space trading simulation set in a sci-fi universe where you play an upstart starship captain running galactic commodities between planets, fighting pirates, alien hostiles, and staying one step ahead of guild regulators. Invest in ship upgrades, risk everything by smuggling precious contraband, buy low, sell high, and struggle to survive in the chaotic age of space.

iPhone Tech Talk World Tour 2009, Hamburg

This Friday I attended the iPhone Tech Talk World Tour in Hamburg. Never having been to an Apple event before I carried some skepticism about the tech:hype ratio calibrated for the talks but in the end it was a rewarding day that proved long on information and short on hyperbole.

Posting Multipart File Uploads on the iPhone

Using an iPhone to post binary files like photos or video to a remote server is not a difficult task, but there’s a wide margin for inexplicable sinkholes ready to swallow precious time with formatting nuances or missing headers. I say this while kicking the muck off my boots myself, as trial by error and a measure of patchwork has brought me to following happy implementation.

iPhone Developer/Development Blogs

Imagine my surprise when the internet failed to produce a select list of iPhone development blogs more than 10 links wide. Well, I’ve beaten the internet at its own game and collected the links myself, like a neurotic SERP.

Managing Local High Scores and Online Leaderboard for your iPhone Games Part 2/2

In the first part this tutorial I demonstrated how to save player scores for an iPhone game. In this post, I’ll explain how to add online support by building a high scores web service in Rails, securing the submissions, and using git to deploy (for free) onto heroku.
One of the principles behind this tutorial was [...]

Managing Local High Scores and Online Leaderboard for your iPhone Games Part 1/2

Why high scores? Because the stamp of public achievement rewards players for investing their time and skill in your game; and because the one-upsmanship of ranking promotes a competitive social awareness which can make a title more enduring.

In this two-part tutorial I’ll explain how to model and store local and high scores in your iPhone game, and build a web service leaderboard with Ruby on Rails.

30 Review Sites to Promote Your iPhone Applications and Games

The internet is aflow with tears from developers bemoaning the oversaturation of the App Store.

In truth, the App Store is now seeing the same saturation of other software markets. Developers are no longer finding themselves entitled to wild success on the basis of a swift release. Realities like promotion and strategy are taking hold, and if you want a lucrative place beside your competitors you’ll have to work just as hard at promoting your product as you always have.

iPhone: Responding to UITabBarController Touches

Responding to the iPhone’s UITabBarController touches should be a direct, uncomplicated process, but in fact requires you to establish a number of hooks throughout your code. There are many reasons you might wish to intercept a UITabBar action, either to cancel and return to a prior tab, to show an alert view, to conditionally push a stack of ViewControllers , and so forth. Here are the steps necessary to make that happen.

iPhone Guidelines and Resources for Artists

I compiled a summary guide for artists working with the iPhone and its own brand of specs and constraints.