Well, after procrastinating for a while, I finally published my first iTunes Mac App Store app, which you can see here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jigsaw-summer-joy-puzzles/id659813149?ls=1&mt=12.  This is not a mobile app, but a desktop version built for Mac OS  from the same code base that has been used for mobile builds here: https://itunes.apple.com/eg/app/jigsaw-summer-joy-puzzles/id659813149?mt=12.   I want to share my experience in […]

Background This is a quick walk trough on how to use ANE (AIR Native Extension) in Flash Professional CS5.5. I assume you know what ANE is, but if you want, you can read Abode’s overview here http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/extensions/index.html. ANE it basically a method to call native code from within Adobe AIR applications. To use Native Extension, […]

Background Captive Runtime is introduced in AIR 3.0 and it allows the AIR runtime to be packaged with your APK so that when user starts the Android version of your application, the user is no longer required to download and install the AIR runtime (this happens if the user does not already have the same […]

Using UIWebView is an efficient way to make an About screen, Help screen, or other sort of hard to layout. Consider how easy it is to lay out your ‘page’ in html, instead of having to build it using Interface Builder. You can even use JavaScript and add interactivity if you want. You can even […]

Cocos2d has always been a popular choice for iPhone game development.  Now there’s now cocos2d-x (http://www.cocos2d-x.org/), a spinoff initiated by Walzer Wang. cocos2d-x is a cross platform version of cocos2d that produces iOS and Android app (plus Windows executable output as bonus if you like).  Cocos2d-x accomplishes the cross-platformness by using native C/C++ code.  This […]

For those interested in Android development, I though I can share my experience setting up Nook Color for Android development.  One of the reasons the Nook Color is appealing to me is because the price is relatively inexpensive and because I want to test apps on a modest processor. Disclaimer: this is not a rooting […]

ARC is a good idea; however it may cause issues when using old libraries or if you have some code which use it and some which don’t. You might also accidentally clicked on it when creating the project and decide, no, I don’t really want it. ARC is not a bad idea, but it will […]

iOS 5 introduces something interesting, which is some sort of Facial Detection capability. Right now it only detects the position of eyes and mouth but expect it to have more in future iOS versions. First, the requirements: Compile with iOS SDK version 5 or later You need to include CoreImage.framework into your project. Your build […]

The Android NDK comes with several examples. This guide assumes you have the NDK environment setup as described here: https://www.permadi.com/blog/2011/09/setting-up-android-jni-projects-in-windows-eclipse-and-sequoyah/. When you extract the NDK, you will see a samples folder. There’s no Eclipse project file in these samples, but it’s very easy to create them. 1. Do File->New->New Project->Android->Android Project. 2. Select Create Project […]

I was having some issue customizing the look and behavior of the default SeekBar so I tried writing a custom one. Here’s the result, hope it’s useful and interesting: My approach is to create a Layout consisting of two ImageViews: a “slider bar” and a “slider thumb” images. Then, in the onDraw function, I draw […]