It’s really cold in Portland, lately. I guess it was 17 degrees fahrenheit when I left for work this morning. I guess the cold weather inspires blogging. My wife is even considering starting a blog all of a sudden.
Anyway, I’ve decided to get back into iPhone development. Lately, at my day job (no, I’m not an actor or musician by day…sorry for any confusion) I’ve been experimenting with iPhone apps for clients. I’m beginning to fall in love with X-Code, as well as Objective-C. I don’t want to say this, but I need to be honest… I am having as much fun with iPhone development as I have ever had developing Flash applications and sites. It’s pretty awesome. In a way, it’s bringing me back to my C# days. It’s awesome how powerful the iPhone SDK is. Seriously, it’s pretty incredible.
I plan on writing more posts on my experiments and experience, hopefully to announce a released app in the App Store. :-)
Sorry for the hiatus – not sure who knows what, but I got married in late spring of this year. It was super busy before the wedding and things haven’t settled down since. We still haven’t decorated the new place yet or anything. In time…
Anyhow, I’ve built this little tool that I needed dearly for a project I was working on and thought I’d share it. I will soon post re-distributable code for everyone if anyone wants it. For now, I will give a short explanation and let you have at it.
The UnicodeGrabber is a tool that will parse any .txt or .xml file, grab all of the characters (only characters in node values/attributes for XML files) and return their Unicode Hex values. It also strips duplicates from the list.
What is this good for? I needed to create a lightweight font package for some Asian Flash pieces and the only way to do that is to only embed the characters you need. Since I have no knowledge of any CJK alphabet I decided to look to code. When you use the Flex SDK to create a font SWF it will (by default) embed the entire character set. Nice. Handy. Except when you need an Asian font package and realize that all of the characters in the Japanese alphabet will weigh down your font SWF to about 12 megabytes. So, it was either make this little app or a really REALLY cool pre-loader…….
Enjoy!
BTW, if it breaks please let me know. Take a screenshot if you can.
Yesterday, I followed Keith Peters’ iPhone tutes at http://bit-101.com/ and also applied for the developer’s license from Apple.
Today, I received my Beginning iPhone Development – Exploring the iPhone SDK from my Amazon order a couple of days ago. My one concern about this book when I ordered it was that it wouldn’t be up to date for iPhone OS 2.2. My concern has been put to rest and I completely recommend this book.
The book is good. I have built some simple physics animations and simple data handling. I’m starting to grasp Objective-C and XCode really well. Nice.
I will undoubtedly have some tutorials on this at some point soon. Stay tuned!
Here is some info on making desktop apps in Flash, and the two ways that I would choose.
Zinc: A SWF2EXE compiler that allows building desktop apps using external classes that are imported when you compile a SWF in Zinc. http://multidmedia.com/
AIR: You should know what this is…
Zinc used to be my #1 when building desktop apps in Flash / Flex Builder. Lately, I am growing quite fond of AIR. Since it has a stronger foothold than it did previously it is making more sense to use it. It’s free.
So far, it seems to be just as powerful as Zinc except that it requires a runtime. However, because it uses a cross-platform runtime it has the upperhand. Zinc requires a seperate volume license for each platform (Windows/Mac/Linux), which means extra money if you want to publish an executable for all three platforms.
The AIR Runtime is gaining tremendous momentum as far as user percentages are concerned. With popular apps like TweetDeck more users are becoming receptive of the AIR Runtime.
I still really like using Zinc and I have never had an issue with it. The support team is great and is quick to respond to issues and there is a giant community. However, AIR is an Adobe product and has that family tie to Flash. Awesome.
Another SWF2EXE compiler is The Jugglor, but I won’t even get into that. It’s pretty low-grade and has a trendy interface as a selling point. Yay.
I just got everything set up for the most part. Google Analytics is working (2 unique visitors today! haha I’m a retard) and my new twitter account is already getting followers. Quite the accomplishment for an afternoon of sitting on the couch. =)
Aside from my new blog, I just picked up a copy of Adobe CS4 Production Premium. Yes, it’s legitimate. I didn’t win at the FlashPDX group when @leebrimelow was giving out copies, but at least I got it hooked up. Now that I have it I wonder how much time I am actually going to spend using it because of how stoked I am about XCode and iPhone development! I’m sure I’ll find time.
Anyway, I’m done with this for the weekend. I’ll make sure to have more fortifying posts in the future. I’m actually getting into AIR quite a bit lately, so maybe I’ll have some apps to share next week.
Welcome to my new blog! I hope you enjoy it more than my old Coldfusion MangoBlog. That was a fun little startup project but now that I’ve had the opportunity to work on so many Wordpress blogs at work I got hooked and needed to make the change.
I hope you enjoy my blog and if you have any suggestions for content just let me know –> kevin@jevinkones.com.
