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More than  2,5 billion people on Earth have smartphones  and use them heavily every day. We spend about  4 hours a day  staring at the screen. Curious fact but each person has  three favorite apps  used most frequently. The leaders among them are Facebook, Youtube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Uber, Gmail …

We are happy to revive our blog with useful and fun information for our readers and to mark this wonderful event we decided to connect it with a present for everybody involved into mobile. This is a free UI Kit for a music app and you can do whatever you want with it: download and save on your computer in order to use in some time, have a look at it and get inspiration for your own apps or rework them partially or completely and create your next great app based on this UI kit!

Yes, there is opportunity to combine this languages in the same project. It’s great. Apple provides a tutorial how to do this magic. You can find  here . But in spite of it I would like to share my experience on real examples, because it’s not as simple as it sounds. Swift code in Objective C …

Today I want to share with you one of my pieces of code that has proved to be quite useful. Sometimes what you need is not something brilliant or especially sophisticated, but something steady and dependable, doing all that annoying work for you. Well that’s  DAAlertController . I did not …

Unfortunately, there’s no official way provided by Apple for this purpose. Let’s look at two methods for solve this problem. Method 1 Apple provides a way to specify application specific language, by updating the “AppleLanguages” key in  NSUserDefaults . For example: [[NSUserDefau…

Few days ago Apple released long-awaited SDK for Apple Watch. Device itself is scheduled to be released early next year (spring most likely). However, Apple as usually granted registered developers an early access to set of libraries and tools for developing application. It is embedded into Xcode 6.2 Beta and called WatchKit. I have put together a quick overview of SDK, describing what developers can and cannot do with Apple Watch.

In iOS 7, Apple introduced AirDrop, a way of sharing files and links between nearby devices using a combination of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. If you’re sharing images, or simple web links, you’ll get the simple behavior with  UIActivityViewController , but if you want to share custom data into your …

In iOS 7 Apple introduced new approach to status bar. It is now rendered above the navigation bar, effectively looking as a part of it. It required some efforts to adapt older applications to this new approach. If developer follows Apple suggestions and guidelines that's not really hard thing to …

If you want to create cross-platform solutions quickly, in particular 2D or simple 3D games, I think you should pay your attention to Marmalade SDK.

Marmalade SDK is a cross-platform solution that allows us to write the source code for a game or an application once in C++ and then deploy it to a number of different platforms, including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, etc.

What you need for this? You will need Microsoft Visual Studio 2008/2010/2012, if you are using windows platform, or the latest Xcode for Mac users, and a licensed copy of the Marmalade SDK.

I just love  UIPageControl , don’t you? It’s simple and intuitive, it does not get any more "native" than this since apple used it in SpringBoard for ages. UIPageControl is the perfect choice when you have a fullscreen  UIScrollView  ( UICollectionView ) with  pagingEnabled  and you want to …

If you are looking for web images caching solution for your iOS application project, we strongly recommend  SDWebImage . It is simple, easy to use, stable and well documented. And impressive  list of users  speaks for itself. SDWebImage provides both memory and disk cache with automatic cache …

Our artist Oleksiy Beztsinnyy shares the process of creating art for Pirates VS Ninjas. Pirates VS Ninjas is a two players strategy  game for iOS and Android. It took around 6 weeks to complete all the graphics. In total there are 14 unique unit types. Each has at least 3 types of animations. Oleksiy also created icon, logo and all the menu screens.

Among the first things I have created logo and main menu screen. Got some references and started picking colors and fonts. Also created some sketches of how things would look.

Apportable allows developer to port their iOS application to Android easily with a very little alterations to the source code. Basically it cross-compiles Objective C or C++ code to Android NDK library. Also it includes libraries for emulating significant amount of iOS SDK APIs. Although Apportable supports UIKit to certain extent, it is intended for OpenGL applications only.

Recently, we have ported our old game title Dragons Rage to Android by means of Apportable platform. This took around 4 days total, which is pretty cool. Apportable is free if you are fine with supporting Android 4.0+ only, don't need support for expansion files and don't need or fine with implementing some useful modules like Facebook SDK, Flurry or Google Analytics yourself.

Today I want to share the sprite generator utility we extensively in our game development projects. It is pretty simple, doesn't have much options, only generates cocos2d compatible spritesheets and only works on Mac OS X. But still we find it extremely useful. Source code is available on github and can be easily tweaked to anyone's needs.