Archive for December 2013

Implementing missing iOS frameworks

The challenge

As I mentioned in previous posts, I’m just writing a game for an iOS under Delphi XE-5.

Well on the begging it was looking really nice and easy, but there are some catches.

XcodeFirst Delphi doesn’t support multi-touch. This was handled thanks to support of Iztok Kacin.

Second catch was MIDI.

I found that iOS can play MIDI by this article, but from Delphi I couldn’t call it, because “god knows why” Embarcadero created support for some of the frameworks under Delphi.

So I was digging and digging and I found out that it’s actually relatively simple to add missing frameworks to Delphi.

The solution

Embarcadero did that for some of them and Xcode gives header files to each of the framework.

Read more

Game Development – Frames per Second

INTRO

At the games development if you paint animations at the screen or you are scrolling the scene, you want it to look smooth. To do that you need paint certain amount of pictures at the screen per second. This is called Frames per Second (FPS).

Eye

When you have a PC/Mac game you usually have to buy better hardware or decrease detail quality to raise the FPS to level that it will be nice.

But if you have the iPhone it’s up to the developer to create the game in such quality to look and works nicely. (if you have Android you have more choices to buy so you can still upgrade).

FPS

But what is the optimal FPS? Well let’s put little of the technical details.

Read more

Tool to easy setup deployment files for Delphi XE5

I’m using Delphi XE-5 for development and they are contradictory.

I think that person who is responsible for whole product is truly visionary and he actually saved future of whole product.

Delphi XE5

The fact that you can by one code develop under Windows (32 or 64bit), Mac, Android and iOS is just amazing.

And it’s really working.

Well the Android app take long time until it starts because the app is not a Java but it’s a native application. Benefit is that any component will work there. It’s really great.

But there are also bad things. There are some decisions that was made and that makes me crazy.

Read more

Make the Total Commander work with FTPS

If you are using the wonderful Total Commander like me you may need to use FTP over SSL (FTPS).

NOTE: don’t mix it with SFTP. SFTP is FTP over SSH and you need to have SSH access to the server to use it. For SFTP download official plugin.

Total Commander

Total Commander doesn’t have it as part of it’s installation and you need to install it manually.

Read more

How to update Mac Pro 1.1 to OS X 10.9 – Mavericks

As I started to develop for the Mac and iPhone/iPads I purchased my self a Mac.

I didn’t want to invest so much into it, so I found used Mac Pro for just 500 USD, but it’s XEON 2x 2 GHz, with 6GB RAM and 500 GB Disk space. For that price quite amazing hardware even for PC.

mac_pro-650x0

And then I want to start to develop my first iPhone application and I found out that I need to have operating system Mountain Lion (10.8) or Mavericks (10.9), but I has Snow Leopard (10.6). When I tried to download the Mavericks from Apple store, but I got message that it’s not compatible.

So I start to dig and I found out that my Mac is version 1,1 which can’t be official updated.

Read more

iPhone 3G – update to iOS 6 is not possible

As I wrote at my previous post, I was trying to update my iPhone 3G to iOS 6 by using whited00r.

iPhone 3G

Well I couldn’t leave it like that so I was playing with that today more and I managed to install the whited00r firmware, thanks to this detail description.

Unfortunately it’s not iOS 6. It’s iOS 3.1.3 with some of the features of iOS 6, but not compatible. Means you can’t download newer apps from the Apple store. Actually I tried about 5 apps (Google maps, etc..) and I didn’t found any that can be downloaded :(.

Read more

iPhone’s screen sizes

Just nice page to show the iPhone’s Screens – http://www.iphoneresolution.com/

Publishing AddHoc application on the iPhone

I’m now working on my first commercial game for the iPhone at Delphi XE5. It’s called Piano Wizard .

Delphi XE5

I was just sending to the customer a version for testing (it’s called Ad hoc) and it doesn’t worked at his phone.

Read more