Apple restored my faith in them

Posted by Johannes Stein on Sep 9, 2010 in Development, News | 1 comment

We all remember the fuzz Apple created back in April when they decided to dictate which programming language (and/or libraries, although that part can be interpreted either way) every iPhone developer had to use. I wrote a short blog post about that, read it here.

But here are the good news: Yeah, FreePascal iPhone applications are now allowed in the App Store (as they were before the April-change). All other programming language are allowed as well.

See for yourself:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/09/09statement.html
http://codeclimber.net.nz/archive/2010/09/09/Apple-relaxing-SDK-license-agreement-MonoTouch-and-Flash-officially-allowed.aspx

This step Apple did calls for a bit of celebration (I’m kidding, well… kinda…) and then I will be announcing my first FreePascal iPhone game soon. (Currently I’m working on an Objective-C iPhone game, but the one after that will be a Pascal iPhone game.)

After the April-change I wasn’t really sure if was going to support Apple further (by that I mean renewing my developer account next year and buying new Apple products), but things might have just changed now.

And of course I will be making the second part of my video tutorial series about SDL and FreePascal for the iPhone.

Ghost Chaos – now available on Apple’s App Store

Posted by Johannes Stein on Apr 21, 2010 in Development, Games, Mac OS X | 2 comments

Apple just approved my game “Ghost Chaos” made with Objective-C and Cocos2D.

Get it here.

What is it all about?
About three years ago, I played a little mini-game that ships with Mario 64 for Nintendo DS on a DS a friend of mine loaned me. It was some kind of “Luigi’s Mansion” light. I always thought the game controls were really awesome taking adavantage of the touchpen. Basically, you have your flashlight and make the ghosts disappear, while the ghosts only appear visible to you when they are in the light cone of your flashlight. You have a time limit which makes the game pretty hard, because you only have a few seconds to get one ghost. Well, someone might have something like that developed for the iPhone App Store, but I haven’t found an app like that. Maybe I was just looking in the wrong place. So I decided, yeah, I’m gonna make a game that resembles that mini-game.
Unfortunately I haven’t unlocked the mini-game on my Nintendo DS yet, so I constructed the game from the memories of playing it then. I also took some creative liberty and modified the controls: You can either make the ghosts disappear by tapping on them or follow the ghosts with your light cone. Both ways have their advantages and disadvantages: While tapping only targets one ghost, it serves the purpose in the first levels, while the light cone can target multiple ghosts at once and will be only way to solve the levels in time when you are playing Level 8 or higher.

Here is a gameplay video:

Click on “Read more” for the post-mortem.

About FreePascal, SDL and the iPhone…

Posted by Johannes Stein on Apr 11, 2010 in Development, Mac OS X | 3 comments

There are a lot of angry blog posts and speculations about Apple’s changed terms of service for iPhone OS 4 out there which seems to ultimately affect FreePascal and Lazarus. I originally planned to release a new video tutorial this weekend covering the following topics:

I’m putting this video on hold for now. But if you wish information on the points just described or care about my personal opinion, please contact me directly.

Simple iPhone example using FreePascal and SDL

Posted by Johannes Stein on Feb 17, 2010 in Development, Games, Libraries, Mac OS X | 3 comments

I’ve made a quick how-to on how to set up a simple iPhone example using FreePascal and SDL and run it with the iPhone simulator.

Please watch in HD. There are englisch and german subtitles available on Youtube.
Video Link on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm4UIPl1GqA
Video Link on Vimeo: http://www.vimeo.com/9522466

The example source code can be downloaded here: http://www.freeze-dev.de/files/SDLiPhoneFPC_Colors.zip

The SDL 1.3 iPhone header I provide in this example is still incomplete and at best Alpha.

Also I’m using ElysionLogger from the Elysion Frameworks Subversion repository to create a HTML log file in the directory of the application bundle. If you don’t any log files to be created, delete ElysionLogger from the uses clause and any calls that begin with TelLogger.getInstance.

Update
If you rather develop with Lazarus, you might want to try this project file, which allows you to install the application on the iPhone Simulator right out of the Lazarus IDE. You need Lazarus 0.9.29 and the iPhone Laz Extension (http://wiki.freepascal.org/iPhone_Laz_Extension).
http://www.freeze-dev.de/files/SDLiPhoneLaz_Colors.zip

MobileBrowser Emulator released

Posted by Johannes Stein on Dec 22, 2009 in Applications, Development | 0 comments

A couple of years back former co-founder of Freeze.Dev, Bengt Beier, wrote a tool called Palm Browser-Emulator. To this day I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails with suggestions of how to improve this application and questions when a new version will be released.

And here it is:
MobileBrowser Emulator, the successor of PalmBrowser Emulator. It is a tool primarily intended for web developers for viewing what their web pages would look like on a mobile device such as Palm, Android devices, iPhone, etc. without needing to install a specific mobile device emulator or SDK.
(Sorry folks, just german language at the moment, but source code comments are in english)

Download here:
Download application (Zip, 24kB, .Net Framework 3.5 is needed)
Download source (Zip, 32kB, C#, used SharpDevelop for development)