Author: Steven Lipton
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The Slippy Flippy Challenge: How to Program a Basic Sprite in Sprite Kit.
The Slippy Flippy challenge was a success. The app was written in one week, debugged in another, and submitted it to the iTunes store in the third. Now a week of waiting to see what Apple thinks of it. But how did I do it? Let’s make a version of Slippy Flippy. I’ll assume you…
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The Slippy Flippy Penguin Challenge: A Tutorial on Sprite Kit
I stuck my foot in my mouth. I’m now chewing vigorously and that is why you are reading this. For those who never heard of Flappy Bird, it was the game sensation nobody expected. It was a game that was very simple: a little bird moves up if you tap the screen, and falls due…
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From Apple to Raspberry Pi: Look ma! No Braces!!
I recently found a Post on Google Plus from Codelect.net that only a programmer would love: Of course this is an endless debate of where to put the braces of a block of code. C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C and even CSS uses those lovely curly braces. Python does something totally mind tripping to me:…
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From Apple to Raspberry Pi: Variables and Types
I’m trying to learn Python for my new Raspberry Pi — though with all the app development I do that is not so easy. I need to wrap my head around some very different concepts. The first concept that is obvious is the dynamic typing of Python. If you’ve used Objective-C or C, those are…
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Going from Apple to Raspberry Pi
I got a new toy this week at work: A Raspberry Pi. It’s a small computer the size of a mint tin that costs about $35. I comes just as a board, but I invested in a nice case for it. Instead of a hard drive you use a SD card for storage of the…
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Keeping things short.
I have a problem. I write too much. It’s not a new problem. In graduate school the words “This is not a dissertation” was found next to the grade on any paper I wrote. While professors might dread reading 100 page papers, I usually ended up with A’s since I was immensely complete and still…
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The Making App Pie Tutorial: The Adventure Begins
I’ve been at Xcode and cocoa Touch for over a year. I’ve had over 1,400 downloads of my apps from the app store and learned a lot about programming in Xcode. I’ve realized something during this time: Programming in OOP is not like programming in C or Basic. When you have a graphic environment like…
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How to get a string with the Date and time in XCode / Cocoa Touch
There are times you look for something simple, and get very frustrated. One of those for me was getting a freaking time stamp on my app. After a bit of chasing around, I did find this in Apple’s documentation, in case you are looking for it. Note there are other constant you can use besides…
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And Another thing: Zero Parameters
So I keep forgetting how to convert from NSString to values. there is a series of methods defined in the NSstring class to do this, such as intValue and floatValue. I keep thinking this backwards, getting confused on a case where there is no parameters in a message. the data is already part of the…
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Hello world!
Like everything in the programming community, It’s important to start with a “hello World” program, or in this case a post. So here I go, Posting stuff. This is not you normal advice blog for app developers. There is a lot of more knowledgeable ones, like Stackoverflow.com for that. I started programming with a brand…
Make App Pie 