Hello out there,
my name is Thomas and I am the first programmer in our new R&D department. Like most of the other guys here at Rough Sea, I’ve worked on games for consoles (Nintendo DS and Wii) and PC before. I’m very excited to develop sophisticated software that helps us to make state-of-the-art games. Of course this is only technically, but I’m pretty sure that Rafael and Jan will assure this for the design part too.
I assume you’ve read the headline already, so you know what the R&D department will work on in the coming months. We’ve decided to do some research on the iPhone, because we think the way you use the iPhone is almost the same as how you play a browsergame. You get your iPhone out of your pocket, use it for a few seconds and put it back again. You have nearly the same procedure with browsergames: you open your browsergame window/tab, change a few settings and go back to work.
So the first thing to do is getting your working environment running. The only legal way to do this is to buy a Mac. I’m not really happy about that, because I’m a Windows guy and there are some differences in using MacOS instead of Windows. Maybe Apple only invented the app store to sell some of their Macs to iPhone developers. Nevertheless after some adjustments the Mac became usable. The nextStep (pun indended) was the installation of the iPhone SDK and all the tools that belong to it. It’s quite easy to get from the installation of the SDK to the first Hello World on the simulator (especially if you compare this to console development).
We at Rough Sea use test driven development and continuous integration to assure that we always have a deliverable product at hand. Unit Tests are already integrated into the SDK and it was easy for Ole to set up a build server on a Mac Mini with hudson and the makefile-like shell tool xcodebuild. You don’t have a makefile: the tool just uses the settings of the project file to know how to build. Another thing is that you can add and change text macros for the XCode IDE. Text Macros are very useful to write code much faster. For example, you can add an alloc-init call [[class alloc] init] simply by typing the letter a and then escape. There are macros for if, for and while too. Because we have different coding guidelines than the apple guys, I had to change some of the macros. You find them in /Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/ PlugIns/TextMacros.xctxtmacro/Contents/ Resources. Copy the TextMacros.xctxtmacro folder to Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/Specifications in your home directory. Just open the *.xctxtmacro files with a text editor to change the macros. You can add your own file and project templates too. This is very nice, because you can set up a default project with many settings, like Unit Test Targets, already in place, and use this project to create new ones with only one click. To add a new project template, create the project the way you like it and copy the whole project folder to Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/XCode/Project Templates/GROUP_NAME/PROJECT_NAME. For file templates you should just copy the File Templates folder from /Developer/Library/Xcode/ to Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/XCode/ and change or add the files you like.
Next time I will write about Objective-C and libraries from the iPhone SDK like UIKit.
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