Raphael Wichmann » iPhone

iKicker – a simple football game

Raphael — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:08:42 +0000

I finally developed my first own iPhone app which is now in the App Store. It is a free and simple football game.

The game is about about keeping a ball in the air. The more often you hit the ball the harder it gets and the more visual effects motivate you to keep trying. The audience is also getting louder. If you reach 25 hits the first firework is launching.

The limit is 400 hits. At this score the sensitive area the ball reacts to is not existent anymore. Plus the gravity and the horizontal deflection is increasing. My goal was to have an easy entry for people who are no pro gamers. So the game is very easy if you begin. But it is getting harder an harder. So pro gamers score are not that far away from the beginners which might motivates the beginners trying to get better.

Another nice feature is the feedback you get if you beat your own high score. The app compares your score with the last 1000 submits of other players and tells you which position you reached. The good thing with this approach is that you always have a relative comparison of your score. Even if 100.000 people are playing every day. With a real leaderboard your ranking would decrease with the number of people playing.

After 5 days in the App Store there are now 4500 entries in the database. After one year there are over 600.000 entries in the database.

Download the game and check it out!
If you like the game I would appreciate it very much if you write a short review. Thanks.

Cheers,
Raphael

iPhone controlled RGB LED via Arduino and DMX

Raphael — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:17:19 +0000

Yes, the title of this post might sound a bit weird but this is actually what I was working on the last days.

I actually planned to dive into this physical computing thing. I guess I told some people about it. Because when I turned 30 there were two unexpected but great gifts. A microcontrolled robot which I soldered in one weekend with more than 150(!) solderings. And a new Arduino board! Thanks to the guys from BigSource for the board!

I wanted to create something that is useful. There are thousands of physical computing examples that do nothing more than switching an LED on or off. I guess there is so much potential in the whole subject. And I’m sure that we will see more and more computer controlled physical objects that are connected to the internet in our every day life.

The cool thing about it is that you break the common workflow of having Keyboard or Mouse inputs and outputs on the screen. Now you can have inputs from thousand of sensors! I bought a motion sensor which detects a finger flip in 10 meter distance. I’m not sure what to do with it yet, but this is so cool! The output can be as different as well. You can control servos or lights or switch your outlets, whatever you want. Plus you can connect the whole thing to the internet. You can imagine how many possibilities you have if you know a bit about programming.

My goal was to create something for the everyday life. Something that is useful for me.
Actually I needed some decoration for my naked white walls in my living room. I was looking for pictures and art over five years and nothing could compete with my beautiful white walls. Now I can keep them white but very colorful. I created an iPhone controlled RGB LED light. This nothing new I guess, but it’s perfect for my living room.

I got the Arduino Board and began programming, soldered a DMX Shield (thanks to Raphael Perret for the etched board), bought a WiFi-Shield and a DMX controller, a RGB LED light and some cables.

Programming in Processing and Objective-C can be very exhausting. There are so many datatypes I never heard of. Something like uint8_t for example which is just a byte. The problem is more about knowing them and knowing when to use which one. Plus the whole pointer stuff really made me want to go back to the warm ActionScript 3 nest where everything made sense and seemed so easy.

Finally it worked. I managed to connect my iPhone with a socket connection via WiFi to my Arduino board. The Arduino board receives the bytes I sent from the iPhone app, converts them, adds some springing for smoother color changes and puts them in a DMX conform protocol. These data are sent to the DMX controller which controlled the lights. Sounds easy, right? It was not. But it was worth the effort!

Ok, have a look for yourself!

This is a video where you can see the parts I have used and how they are assembled.

This is the light in action!

Beginning iPhone Development

Raphael — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 18:22:51 +0000

The title says what I am doing and it’s also the title of my current favourite book.

I bought two books. One is for diving into Objective-C and the other one is about the iPhone SDK. It worked out to be a good idea having two books. One for Objective-C basics and the other one more iPhone specific. Although the iPhone book is my favourite book, you need to have basic knowledge about Objective-C to understand what they are doing there.

This book: Beginning iPhone Development is really good. Every chapter contains a Step by Step tutorial on a specific theme. It’s really fun reading and everything is really easy explained.

The second book called Programming in Objective-C is ok but it’s nothing special. It’s not bad though. It’s just a usual book about a programming language. If you consider buying this book better buy this one: “Programming in Objective-C 2.0″. Or a completely different one.

So I started reading the Objective-C book. If you are familiar with ActionScript everything seems different to you. How you declare variables, call functions, handle events and a lot more. Tracing! So simple in ActionScript. And a good example for a comparison:

trace("myNumber: " + myNumber);

NSLog([[NSString alloc]
initWithFormat:@"myNumber: %f", myNumber]);

What is that?! Some things are really strange. And I’m not into it that much that I could say: “Ok, it is a little bit odd but actually it is better because … “. So I just accepted it

Even if it is a little bit painful for me leaving the comfortable ActionScript enviroment it is a lot fun starting with iPhone programming. You simply have access to data you normally don’t have in ActionScript. Think of things like multitouch, accelerometer, GPS location, access to the adressbook of the user and a lot more.

So I started developing a really simple game. I think it is always good if you set yourself a goal to achieve. My goal is to develop a simple football game. The concept is pretty easy. You kick a ball and have to keep in the air. The longer you keep the ball in the air the higher the score. The score is to be saved in a database later.

I read the iPhone book and Keith Peters tutorial about gravity on the iPhone. And i watched some videos on this site: www.iphonedevcentral.org.

This is the current state. Unfortunately it doesn’t run that smooth on the iPhone. The difference between the X-Code-Simulator and the runtime on the iPhone is pretty big. I guess I should do the movement with openGL. Another language I don’t know. But the book is already ordered Have a look for yourself:

Objective-C, first steps

Raphael — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:14:53 +0000

Actually I’m wondering how many people start coding Objective-C these days. Especially Flash coders. It must be the App-Store that comes with the iPhone making it really easy to publish your applications to millions of people with a minimum of effort.

Plus Flash 10 doesn’t really come with that much new stuff that you don’t need to study every day to keep track with the development. Compared to the times when AS2 was released for example. It’s not that there is nothing new to learn for me. Especially in the area of Application Frameworks.. I’m still stuck with Cairngorm which does a good job for me though.

I’m just interested in some new things. And Objective-C is something pretty new for me. Its a C-Language and the syntax is fairly different from what you know from ActionScript.

The good thing I realized is: If you understood the core concepts of object oriented programming, you can easily learn Objective-C. It’s more like a different dialect from the same logical language.

Today I wrote my first application. It’s a really simple calculator but it gives you an impression on how the Objective-C syntax looks like.

//
// main.m
// Calculator
//
// Created by Raphael Wichmann on 05.02.09.
// Copyright Raphael Wichmann 2009. All rights reserved.
//

#import
#import

@interface Calculator: Object
{
int _numbera;
int _numberb;
}

-(void) print;
-(void) setNumberA: (int) a;
-(void) setNumberB: (int) b;

@end

@implementation Calculator

-(void) print
{
int result = _numbera + _numberb;
printf("Result: %i + %i = %i", _numbera, _numberb, result);
}

-(void) setNumberA: (int) a
{
_numbera = a;
}

-(void) setNumberB: (int) b
{
_numberb = b;
}

@end

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
Calculator *_calculator = [Calculator new];
[_calculator setNumberA:15];
[_calculator setNumberB:7];
[_calculator print];

return 0;
}

With the magic of Objective-C this complex application is capable of adding 15 to 7 which makes 22. Whew