Labs

In Part I of our distribution learnings we learned important lessons like the importance of mapping our certificate request to the same name in the iPhone Developer Portal, the differences between Agents and Admins and Developers (oh my!) and the answer to the all important question: "What should I set my bundle identifier to?"

Now in Chapter II of understanding iPhone distribution we'll uncover provisioning for ad-hoc applications and prepping an application for final deployment on iTunes Connect.

When I first started dabbling with Objective-C and iPhone development I found the entire learning process cumbersome and frustrating. In fact, many days I still do. Often Apple’s documentation seems dated, complex or difficult to find. The hangover of the NDA from the early era of iPhone development still lingers – there is a dizzying amount of information to consume and understand before you can develop for this phone.

I’d like to start sharing some of the learnings I’ve had along the way. Not every solution I’ve come up with is perfectly in tune with the patterns the Objective-C community or Apple recommends. I’m coming at iPhone dev from the angle of a self-taught programmer, someone who cut their teeth on JavaScript and ActionScript and now has stumbled onto something a little more complicated. Hopefully these articles will help me and the community at large to better document and understand this exciting new territory.

If you missed Flash on Tap, you missed out. I had a blast in Boston meeting and drinking with the community. Let me tell you, the infrared5 people know how to throw a party. My presentation covered Big Spaceship's process on a day-to-day level -- the 10 fundamentals that get us through what seem like crazy deadlines. I've posted the slides on SlideShare for your downloading pleasure.

UPDATE: Or you can just watch 'em here!

For a project we were building recently in PaperVision3D I came across a problem when trying to clip MovieMaterials inside of a plane.  Another big factor was that my stage was not set to scaleToStage, which seemed to fix the problems the little I played with it.  However, for this site it wasn't an option. Following is some insight into the steps I took to solve this problem in hopes that it saves someone else some time.  Admittedly, this problem should be no biggie for the papervision buff, but it took me a while to track down an answer.

What started off as taking my first steps in Papervision evolved into the creation of a visualization that maps audio spectrums to a 3D body. My goal was to display sound as a smoothly tangled structure as well as having it clearly react to highlights and different instruments in the song. The Candy Sound Visualizer is the result of those experiments.

We went to the FITC conference in Toronto last week and had a blast. There was a good vibe all around and we had a lot of fun. To pass along all the good stuff we saw we generated a big FITC link dump featuring links to speakers, presentations and presented work we liked.

With the launch of the new Big Spaceship site comes a relaunch of our Labs blog, and we have invited our design team to join the party. Joining our posts about code and technology will be insights into our design team's approach, experiments, techniques and, perhaps most important of all, the close collaboration between the two disciplines. Stay tuned, and be sure to update the url for our RSS feed in your reader : feeds2.feedburner.com/bigspaceshiplabsfeed

I am getting excited about FITC Toronto, which is coming up in April. I will be giving two presentations this year: one about BSS during which I will be showing some internal projects and experiments the team has been working on, and I will be moderating a panel about collaboration titled "There is no 'I' in Team ... But There is Meat," featuring some seriously kickass panelists: Stacey Mulcahy (bitchwhocodes), Mathew Ray (CP+B), Dan LaCivita (firstborn), and Ulises Valencia (Grupo W).

Get your tickets now. It's gonna be good.

We were curious if we could run a simple test that quickly compares the new Flash10 3D capabilities and Papervision3D.

We are totally aware of the fact that Flash 3D and all other 3D engines like Papervision3D or Away3D are very different approaches.

The Question is more: Flash10 3D or Papervision3D for simple 3D features on a site?

Our quick and dirty test is to create 1000 rectangles, randomly place them in 3D space, animate it a bit and see what is faster.