How hard can it be?
When I was a boy, the first programs I ever wrote for a computer were computer games. They weren’t particularly good, but the sense of achievement of turning endless typing of BASIC code into a game I...
View ArticleGetting started with OpenGL
While the kinds of games I like to play have traditionally used isometric graphics, and those do have a certain retro appeal, I wouldn’t be happy as a player today with that. Even playing OpenTTD today...
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What is the Matrix (order)?
As if trying to drag memories of vectors and matrices out of the long-discarded parts of your brain reserved for high school mathematics wasn’t hard enough, another curve ball is thrown at you when you...
View ArticleCorrectly calculating time since last frame with CVDisplayLink
In a previous post, I repeated a piece of code retrieved from the Internet that was intended to calculate the interval since the last frame when using CVDisplayLink. Unfortunately that code was...
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First Screenshot!
Ok, this will go down in history as the least exciting first screenshot in the history of first screenshots, but here you go: There’s a whole bunch of experimentation going on here: The window contains...
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More experimentation
I’m steadily progressing through the OpenGL API and adding experiments to the test code as I go to make sure I’ve got the basics down. Here we can see the result of adding camera motion, texturing,...
View ArticleiMagic
Apple are expected to announce some form of innovative new payment system tomorrow morning, but I think another company already has the jump on them for that: Disney.If you’ve stayed in their Walt...
View ArticleSongs of Innocence
The most surprising thing about Apple’s move to preload the new U2 album onto iPhones isn’t that they did it, but that people are surprised that users are angry about it.For example John Gruber...
View ArticleThe missing iOS 8 NFC API
There have been a bunch of comments and criticisms flying around that iOS 8 is missing any kind of API or SDK for developing applications to take advantage of the NFC chip in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6...
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A road trip with Apple CarPlay
With almost impeccable timing, the firmware upgrade to support Apple’s CarPlay was released for my car’s heads-up unit the day before I was set to go on a road trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles...
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Happy 10th Birthday, Ubuntu
20th October 2004, ten years ago today, Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog) was released. While the user community celebrates the decade anniversary today, for me and those of us who worked on it, it was the...
View ArticleThe Slacker List
It’s been six weeks since Apple launched the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, and over four months since WWDC when Apple revealed the changes to the AutoLayout APIs to enable apps to adapt to the larger...
View ArticleSwift: Generating keys, and Encrypting and Decrypting text
Swift is still a very new programming language and as such there hasn’t been time yet for a large body of lore about the correct way to do things to be built up on the Internet. Apple have done a good...
View ArticleSwift: Storing key pairs in the keyring
In my last blog post I described how to generate public/private key pairs in Swift and use them to encrypt and decrypt text. But that’s not entirely useful in its own unless you have a place to store...
View ArticleRestored some older posts
You can always use the Internet Archive to access older content, but there were a few key posts that people kept coming to my blog for.Since they were useful documentation in their own right, and one...
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The changing face of Top Gear
“Yes! We’re older, we’re fatter, we’re greyer. But we’re back!”“A few years ago we staged a race across London. We used a car, public transport, bicycle, and a speed boat down the river Thames. And it...
View ArticleRIP Sir pterry
I used to boast that I was the proud owner of a complete collection of unsigned Terry Pratchett hardcover first editions.This was a particularly pleasing concept to me because Terry was such a prolific...
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Custom iOS segues, transitions, and animations the right way
Let’s take a simple scenario: you have two UIViewControllers within a UINavigationController and you want the transition between them, in both directions, to be a fade-in effect rather than the usual...
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Watch Shot
Sharing screenshots from the WATCH with your friends just doesn’t quite work out…Thanks to the dark background, and lack of margin between the UI and the edge of the screenshot, they end up looking...
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Xcode: two Apps with a shared private Framework, in a WorkSpace
I’ve been working on a reasonably large iOS project that has ended up consisting of multiple, related, iOS apps for which I’ve wanted to share a large amount of code through the use of shared, private,...
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