-
The Slippy Flippy Challenge: Make Active Boundaries in Sprite Kit.
In Flappy Bird, hitting the top or bottom boundaries ends the game. They also convey a sense of motion. The boundaries make for a better playing experience. Last time, we set up collision detection, but we need boundaries that are sprites. Sprite node boundaries would be able to tell us what we hit, and run…
-
Make a Clock in Sprite Kit: Adding Animation to the Clock
In our first installment, we added a label and set up a clock. We could easily do that with a story board and a wired up label. The point of series this is to have a lot of cool animation running in Sprite Kit for a non game UI. We will begin to add animation…
-
Living Without Storyboards: Make a Clock with Sprite Kit
Sprite Kit — it’s not just for games anymore. Sprite Kit is of course meant to write games, a full 2-d game engine waiting for use inside Xcode and iOS7. While simulating buttons writing SlippyFlippyPenguin, I began to realize there’s a lot more here that could be applied to a general UI. I’ve often tried…
-
The SlippyFlippy Challenge: Working With Sprite Kit Collision Detection
In our last installment, we ran into a problem trying to get collisions to work correctly with the obstacle. We want it to interact with the penguin, but not the game world. If we turn on physics, either the edgeLoop on the scene blocks the obstacle from entering the scene by , or causes very jittery…
-
From Apple to Raspberry Pi: A Gentle Introduction to Themed Widgets With ttk
Up to this point we have used tkinter widgets. For every widget, we had to set all the attributes. We could have this on off panel of three buttons and a label: Type it in, save and run. Each button uses the same .configure() for every widget: While we have only three buttons, this can…
-
From Apple to Raspberry Pi: More Widgets! More Power!!!
We covered some of the major simple widgets in Tkinter. There are a few more used less regularly: radio buttons, checkboxes, sliders, and spinners. This lesson, we’ll look at those widgetsand make a better power panel. Control Variables We used control variables in the Button, Entry and Label widgets. The control variable in a button…
-
The SlippyFlippy Challenge: Make a Better Obstacle in Sprite Kit
Build a Better Obstacle In the SlippyFlippy challenge we have a small obstacle. In Flappy Bird there are two obstacles which the bird has to pass between. Let’s change our current obstacle into a pass-through obstacle like Flappy Bird. Make a Random Obstacle Our current obstacle is a bit boring. It always shows up…
-
From Apple to Raspberry Pi: Making Round Rectangle Buttons — The Movie
When I posted yesterday about GIMP and making Buttons for Python projects on the Raspberry Pi, I had thought someone would have a tutorial for the classic pre-iOS7 rounded rectangle button. I didn’t find any. Here is a video I put together of making those buttons in GIMP on the Raspberry Pi. At the end…
-
From Apple to Raspberry Pi: Making Icons and Cool Buttons
If there is one thing that Apple developers believe, user interfaces needs to look cool. Looking cool often requires not text, but images on your on your controls. While not as robust as UIView and its subclasses, Tkinter does display graphics. We can add buttons that look a lot better than the standard buttons. Make…
-
Living Without Storyboards or Interface Builder: Grids and a Grid Class
Using Grids As Steve Jobs liked to say… “Oh, and one more thing more thing.” In my last post Living without Storyboards or Interface Builder, I mentioned scribbling on a piece of paper. I do that often, but it is helpful to go one step further: use a preset grid. The web building world, at…
Make App Pie
Training for iOS Developers and Artists
Make App Pie 