Things that were not immediately obvious to me

Today we’re going to finish updating the Demine project for the iOS 4.0 environment by adding complete support for multitasking. Even though Demine is not going to be doing any background processing, it turns out that a multitasking environment mandates certain changes to the program; some we saw last week, and the balance we’ll see now.

(We’ll be making changes to the project as we left it last week; you can download the final version here.)

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Today we’re going to continue updating the Demine project for the iOS 4.0 environment: we’re going to begin to add support for multitasking. Even though Demine is not going to be doing any background processing, it turns out that a multitasking environment mandates certain changes to the program, as we shall soon see.

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I want to walk through the process of updating the Demine project for the iOS 4.0 environment. This procedure is more complex than that associated with retargeting for earlier OSes, largely because iOS 4.0 adds support for multitasking and for high-resolution devices. Although these features don’t demand explicit application support, a developer is well-advised to consider them in his code. Today I’m going to look at the issues raised by high-resolution screens, and next week we’ll consider the implications of multitasking.

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Guess who just got their new game approved and placed in the app store? That’s right: It’s me.

If you’d like your shiny new iPhone to do a credible imitation of a 28 year old Apple ][, then you should totally go to the iTunes store and download my port of Taipan! right this very instant. Right now! Don’t wait one minute more!

Seriously, why are you still here?

Kidding aside, I’m pretty proud of this port. I’ve always had a deep fondness for this game, and this port is extraordinarily faithful to the original game balance. Plus, I made every effort to optimize the interface for ease-of-use on a handheld. It’s simple, fun, and addictive. And you should download it. And leave a good review. And buy the unlock.

I’ve updated my Shiny Red Button code to render high-resolution buttons on high-resolution devices. This code must be linked against the iOS 4.0 SDK, but can target iOS 3.0. You can download the header and source files right away, or read a bit about the change below.

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Last year, I wrote a small disassembler for the 8086 instruction set in Python. I was recently flattered to learn that Transistorski thought it was worth building upon. He has adopted the project, cleaned it up, and put it on Google Code.

He seems to have interesting ambitions, so you might want to stop by his blog.

I’ve rebalanced my Taipan! browser port to mimic Ronald J. Berg’s Apple ][ version of the game. The changes make the game quite a bit tougher; bad things happen more frequently, and the scoring is harsher. But, hey: authentic!

Today we finally submit our Minesweeper clone to AAPL for approval. Let’s see how that goes. In the meantime, you can download the latest source code here.

Allow me to offer two words (well, “paragraphs”) of warning about the project’s default configuration (”Simulator – 3.0 | Debug”):

1. If you execute certain perfectly legal Core Graphics code in the 3.0 Simulator, you generate a lot of very worrying memory management errors. I wrote a little bit about it here. You can ignore(!) the errors, or run against the 3.1 (or later) Simulator.
2. In-app purchases don’t work in the Simulator at all; if you want to exercise this part of the code, you’ll need to run it on a device.

Incidentally: I wouldn’t say that implementing in-app purchases was hard, per se, but there were a lot of little things to run down. (E.g., if you don’t have a network connection, the store kit doesn’t report an error when you request product descriptions: it just never returns a result.) It took a while to get all that sorted out, but much of the resulting code should be reusable.

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Today we bring our Minesweeper project almost to the point of completion. The latest version (you can download the Xcode project here) adds puzzle setup, high-score tracking, and auto-clear, along with an assortment of odds and ends needed to get the code ready for release.

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Today I provide an updated Xcode project for our Minesweeper clone. This version implements a lot (but not all) of the design we covered on Monday, including all the gameplay features aside from auto-clear. You can download the project here; I discuss it, in very general terms, below.

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