I recently shopped quite a lot at ThinkGeek, my favorite store for nerd-shirts. I always fill my shopping cart to the brink and then reduce the shirts and gadgets to the stuff I really really REALLY need. After ordering I stuck around for a moment and put some other things in my shopping cart but ultimately did not buy them and just left.
What I ate is now available in the App Store. It is a minimalistic approach to food logging. You just take pictures of every meal you eat and What I ate keeps track of them in a slick interface. By taking a photo of every meal (and therefor making it a very conscious process ) you will better remember what you ate and also be able to see it (in case you forgot).
This morning Paula asked me to create a demo project for Particle Playground so users can simply import their emitters and see how it will look on the device. This should be especially interesting for heavy-duty emitters (birthRate > 500 or high velocity). Naturally I created a small Xcode project for you to download and play with.
For my latest app I wanted UICollectionView to behave like a UITableView in respect to its headers sticking to the top of the screen. Well, actually I wanted my collection view to scroll horizontally and therefor have the header cells stick to the left side of the screen.
I spend quite a few bucks on the image assets of my apps and most of the time I spend these bucks at iStockphoto. The site has loads of great content and you can find good quality images for virtually any intended use. There is only one thing I would like them to improve – the preview area for images is way too small.
UPDATE: Apple has just approved and Particle Playground v1.1 is now available in the Mac App Store.
Yesterday I uploaded Particle Playground v1.1 for Apple to review. I have been working on v2.0 but I received a mail that landscape support was something that was being looked forward to, so I decided to release an intermediary version with just a few new things.
Today Particle Playground was released on the Mac App Store. Since there is only one default particle emitter image included I thought you might be interested in the other particle images I used to make the screenshots for the Mac App Store.
I am so excited! Apple just approved Particle Playground and I set things up so that it will be available tomorrow (February 15th). There will be a 50%-off sale for the first two days. So it will cost 4.99$ for the first two days and 9.99$ after that.
You can read what I blogged about UIKit particle emitters in my recent posts or check it out in the Mac App Store.
I hope you enjoy PP as much as I enjoyed creating it and hopefully it soothes your pain as it did mine.
While developing my last app I got the idea to add some sparkle to it. But since I’m not using cocos2d or some other framework I had to use the standard iOS classes CAEmitterLayer and CAEmitterCell to set-up my particle emitter. After a while I started to grow tired of the hassle of always tweaking the emitter the tiniest bit and then recompiling and running the app in the simulator.
UPDATE: Here is the Particle Playground savefile for this emitter so you can also check it out in Particle Playground.
I recently spent a lot of time working with CAEmitterLayer and CAEmitterCell. After a while I stumbled upon one curious thing. The particle image you use in your CAEmitterCell gets mirrored horizontally.