Your browser may have trouble rendering this page. See supported browsers for more information.

This page shows the source for this entry, with WebCore formatting language tags and attributes highlighted.

Title

Apple Developer Videos

Description

It's well-known that Apple runs a walled garden. Apple makes its developers pay a yearly fee to get access to that garden. In fairness, though, they do provide some seriously nice-looking APIs for their iOS and OS X platforms. They've been doing this for years, as listed in the post <a href="http://berzniz.com/post/72083083450/ios-7-only-is-the-only-sane-thing-to-do" source="" author="Tal Bereznitskey">iOS 7 only is the only sane thing to do</a>. It argues that the new stuff in iOS 7 is compelling enough to make developers consider dropping support for all older operating systems. And this for pragmatic reasons, such as having far less of your own code to support and correspondingly making the product cost less to support. It's best to check your actual target market, but Apple users tend to upgrade very quickly and reliably, so an iOS 7-only strategy is a good option. Among the improvements that Apple has brought in the recent past are blocks (lambdas), GCD (asynchronous execution management) and ARC (mostly automated memory management), all introduced in iOS 4 and OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. OS X 10.9 Mavericks and iOS 7 introduced a slew of common UI improvements (e.g. AutoLayout and HTML strings for labels).<fn> <n>To find the videos listed below, browse to <a href="https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2013/">WWDC 2013 Development Videos</a>.</n> For the web, Apple has improved developer tools and support in Safari considerably. There are two pretty good videos demonstrating a lot of these improvements: <dl dt_class="field"> #601: Getting to Know Web Inspector This video shows a lot of improvements to Safari 7 debugging, in the form of a much more fluid and intuitive Web Inspector and the ability to save changes made there directly back to local sources. #603: Getting the Most Out of Web Inspector This video shows how to use the performance monitoring and analysis tools in Safari 7. The demonstration of how to optimize rendering and compositing layers was really interesting. </dl> For non-web development, Apple has been steadily introducing libraries to provide support for common application tasks, the most interesting of which are related to UI APIs like Core Image, Core Video, Core Animation, etc. Building on top of these, Apple presents the Sprite Kit---for building 2D animated user interfaces and games---and the Scene Kit---for building 3D animated user interfaces and games. There are some good videos demonstrating these APIs as well. <dl dt_class="field"> #500: What’s New in Scene Kit An excellent presentation content-wise; the heavily accented English is sometimes a bit difficult to follow, but the material is top-notch. #502: Introduction to Sprite Kit This is a good introduction to nodes, textures, actions, physics and the pretty nice game engine that Apple delivers for 2D games. #503: Designing Games with Sprite Kit The first half is coverage of tools and assets management along with more advanced techniques. The second half is with game designers Graeme Devine<fn> and Spencer Lindsay, who designed the full-fledged online multi-player game <i>Adventure</i> to showcase the Sprite Kit. </dl> <hr> <ft>Disclaimer: I work with C# for Windows and HTML5 applications of all stripes. I don't actually work with any of these technologies that I listed above. The stuff looks fascinating, though and, as a framework developer, I'm impressed by the apparent cohesiveness of their APIs. Take recommendations with a grain of salt; it could very well be that things are a good deal less rosy when you actually have to work with these technologies.</ft> <ft>Formerly of Trilobyte and then id Software, now at Apple.</ft>