Posts Tagged ‘iPad’

About a week ago ABC of the Sea was accepted by Apple for inclusion in the App Store! It’s a universal app that will work on all recent iOS devices but it really is visually more exciting on the iPad.

Obligatory plug: It’s only 99¢ (or other local denomination)! Go buy it!

ABC of the Sea is a children-focussed animated book featuring 26 pages of hand-drawn marine life. The illustrations were originally produced by my wife many years ago but never published. Our own child can now read and a print of the book surfaced which she thoroughly enjoyed. We then had the idea to turn it into an iPad application. Each page has been carefully, but subtly animated in a fashion largely consistent with how the creature (or plant) behaves in its natural habitat, though some artistic license has been taken if the real-life movements would be virtually undetectable. (more…)

A couple of weeks ago I posted about automating Ad-Hoc publishing using some simple shell scripting and a modified version of the BetaBuilder utility by Hunter Hillegas. Based on a comment on his blog I’ve taken this a step further: I’ve fully integrated the publishing mechanism into Xcode. Here’s how… (more…)

A while back, I came across Jeffrey Sambells post about iOS Wireless App Distribution, thought “that’s cool, I could automate most of that” and then promptly forgot about it. A little after this, Hunter Hillegas introduced iOS Beta Builder which I also thought “cool, I could extend that to do some of the automation I thought about” and then forgot about it again.
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As I was developing the ABC of the Sea App, which is an interactive picture-book based on a proof-of-concept Tara (my wife) made many years ago and did not publish, one of the early and obvious items on the checklist of cool things it should do is have a nice curling transition when moving between pages. Initially I expected this to be easy – Apples Apps do this, iBooks on the iPad especially, so it’s built in, right?

Wrong. Well, mostly wrong. I quickly discovered that the only documented curling transition for a UIView goes up/down, not left/right. It’s the one that Maps uses. Some Googling then revealed that an undocumented transition did perform left/right curling. However, being undocumented means it’s not viable for an App Store submission. It may later acquire an official constant and become kosher, but not yet.

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