For a while I have been struggling with snapping a a view to a grid, as for some strange reason the view was snapping to the grid one off where it should have been in some situations. After a lot of playing around and visualising the views frame I realised that the frame was wrong. This took me by surprise as It was something I really relied on in my snapping code, especially the frame origin. With my views I also rotated them by 90 degrees using the setTransform method which I later realised was the problem case. After searching around on the internet I found a website that mentioned this exact thing, It turns out that if you use the setTransform method or in fact change the transform of a view to anything but the identity matrix then the frame is completely unreliable. To me this seems pretty strange and is something I thought apple would have taken care of as it has set me back a few days ( pretty frustrating ). 

I have now got past this little hurdle and everything is starting to run more smoothly now, I just changed all my snapping code to use the views centre(center if you are american). Changing this single thing literally sorted all the snapping out and I've managed to put some more of my game play in. 

The artist I'm working with has done some more artwork and I'm hoping to get that in soon and maybe I will show a video and you can all see the Idea I'm working on. 

Keep coding :)

I have been persisting with iOS Development and my app is starting to come along now. Lately I have been focusing on implementing the "Single Player" aspect of the game, mostly because I was sick of not being able to show people what it actually does. It's still slow going at the moment but it is definitely moving in the right direction. My Idea of having something on the app store within a few months of getting my Mac was naive to say the least. At the current rate I am hoping to have something that is worthy of a first release by the winter, plus I think people are more likely to play in winter. 

On a technical note, I have been working a lot with delegates in Objective C and they seem very powerful. They also work very well with the MVC pattern. 

One of my main issues is working in the different view spaces. In my app I have to do a lot calculations for positioning different views pragmatically but due to the hierarchy of subviews you have to take extra caution to ensure you are doing the calculations relative to the same view. 

Things are starting to pick up slightly and I will soon have a fully working prototype, once that happens I will upload a video and let everyone see what it is I am working on, but until then it's a secret ;)

Cheers :)

I have recently been following a monster 7 part tutorial: How To Make a Simple Playing Card Game with Multiplayer and Bluetooth. It deals a lot with GameKit and is a great insight into how to use networking within an app. The tutorial uses the old style nibs rather than the newly promoted Storyboard approach for designing the User Interface. After finishing this tutorial I have tried implementing a lot of the same functionality into my own app.

This has caused a lot of trouble as the I am using the new Story boarding approach which involves these things called "Segue's". They are basically a link between two scenes in the storyboard, that you can add via the user interface. Trying to implement these things pragmatically has been a bit of a nightmare but I'm hoping in the long run it will make my life easier. 

I finally got the majority of the networking stuff down and I am currently re-designing some of the game classes to ensure they are using the proper MVC ( Model, View, Controller ) pattern and also delegates.

Hopefully this will all start to pick up a little as I am becoming pretty fluent with ObjectiveC and the Interface Builder is starting to make sense (or I am just becoming as equally mental as the Interface Builder).

Cheers :)  

Since buying my MacBook I have been reading lots of articles and documentation on the apple developer site. I purchased the iOS Developer Program before my Mac had even arrived ( Wanted a head start ). I thought development would be easy due to the fact that you can use C++ instead of objective C and there wouldn't be too much for me to learn. I was very wrong! Just getting used to using my Mac took a while, figuring out where my files are, how to download programs and where they would be. After this hurdle I got myself stuck into xCode the apple IDE for development. This program is pretty chunky and took some getting used to, especially when it came to the Interface Builder.

I'm not going to say exactly what project I'm currently working on as I wouldn't want people to steal the idea but I decided to start initially with a game. Looking back I think it was a little ambitious as now I'm finding it a bit of a struggle. I should have started with something a little simpler. I am currently taking a short break from the one specific game idea and doing a few tutorials which show how to implement some of the features I will need in my app. I am also attempting to learn Objective C rather than try and do all this using C++. Surely It can only work out better if I use the programming language they mainly support.

I am hoping things are going to pick up once I have done these tutorials and everything will just fall into place. 

Cheers :)