I went to Florida for my Christmas holiday. In order to not stress out the cat too much, the cat stayed home rather than go to a kennel. No professional pet sitter was available where I live. So I opted to create a home surveillance system from hardware I had lying around and free software.
I finally got around to downloading the iPhone SDK to see what I can do with it. Since I’ve dabbled in game development back when I worked with Flash and Director, I figured I’d see what I can do with the iPhone. I wanted to start with a framework and I looked at Torque and Unity. Though inexpensive by game engine standards, during a recessionary time of cost cutting, it’s hard to validate a nearly $1000 purchase, especially if you don’t know yet if that investment would pay off. So I finally settled on the cocos2d-iphone framework which is based on the cocos2d framework for Python. There is little to no documentation, so be prepared to read source code. Monocle Studio’s whitepaper will definitely help you bootstrap your project. In the spirit of that paper, I thought I’d share my translation of the cocos2d “Hello, World” example adapted for the cocos2d-iphone framework.
I like to use my iPhone for viewing podcasts. However, managing them through iTunes leaves much to be desired because some podcasts I like to view and then trash them, while others I like to archive and have synced at all times. iTunes does not have an obvious way to set this up.
January, last year, I had thought perhaps my switch to Apple would begin with the first rev iPhone. By the time the iPhone debuted it didn’t provide a good enough value proposition for me then. Fast-forward to July 12th, and you would have found me standing in line to buy an iPhone 3G.