cbaltzer - Tumblr blog

[cbaltzer]

Kind've a terrible title, but hey, I wrote a blog post! As the title might suggest, it's a tutorial on native iOS plugins for Unity3D. Check it out.

[cbaltzer]

CloudPrefs

Having to submit an app update just for minor content changes is a huge pain. Especially with Unity. CloudPrefs provides a PlayerPrefs-like dictionary that's backed by Parse, and can be updated from the web. It includes an extension for NGUI's UILabel that will sync the label text to the value in the dictionary. It will default to PlayerPrefs when network access isn't available.

Check it out: CloudPrefs on GitHub

[cbaltzer]

Aperture

Fast, simple screen capture for iOS. Get it on the Asset Store!

Features

Writes to camera roll, disk, or a texture

Optional capture preview

Supports MSAA

Fully compatible with Vuforia and other AR libraries

For more details, check out the documentation!

Video

There's a demo video coming soon!

[cbaltzer]

Diffusion

Easy social networking for iOS. Get it on the Asset Store!

Features

Share on the iOS built-in social networks

Supports Facebook, Twitter, and more

Easily extendable with custom UIActivities

For more details, check out the documentation!

Screenshots

There's a demo video coming soon, but screenshots will have to do for now.

Easily customization through the Editor:

Diffusion in action:

[cbaltzer]

An extension method to add a parameter to your Invoke calls. 

[cbaltzer]

NativeUI

NativeUI is a Unity plugin I've been working on for a little while now. It allows you to display a native iOS view on top of Unity. It supports iOS 5 Storyboards, as well as the older XIB. It can be used to show a full screen view, such as a menu, or a smaller popover. 

It also wraps the message passing system, in both directions. Native code can pass messages into Unity, and Unity can pass messages back. In the example above, the "Load" button sends a message to Unity to load in the red particle system. 

Currently only iOS is supported, but Android support is going to be added soon (read: eventually). 

Also, it's free! 

https://github.com/cbaltzer/NativeUI

[cbaltzer]

Estimating App Store file sizes

For many of our apps, it'se critical that they be able to be downloaded over 3G. Unfortunately, the App Store limits 3G downloads to 50MB, which can be a struggle when trying to fit lots of 3D/media content into an app. The problem is that the IPA file generated by Xcode is not the same file that gets downloaded from the App Store. Apple does some encryption on their end once you submit your app, which typically adds 5MB or so (up to 13MB in one case!) to the IPA size. This means that when building your app, your actual size target needs to be anywhere from 35 to 45 MB instead of the full 50. 

App size = (executable from IPA) + (rest of IPA contents compressed)

You can estimate the App Store size by uncompressing the IPA file (it's just a zip), taking the executable out of it, and re-zipping everything else. Add the two together and that should be roughly your App Store size. In our testing it's been pretty close to accurate.

Not a very complicated process but still annoying to do manually. So, here's a script to do it for you!

https://github.com/cbaltzer/AppStoreEstimation

[cbaltzer]

The original metal cover of a pop song. 

[cbaltzer]

A little AR demo I made with a model of Zeratul, made by Eric Hart. Some more screenshots here. 

[cbaltzer]

Live Hub Remote

After keeping it private for many months, I've decided to open source my Live Hub Remote app. It will almost certainly be rejected from the App Store for misusing the iPod controls, so I'm not going to bother. Instead, you can build and install it yourself. All it takes is a copy of Xcode, which is free on the Mac App Store. Just download the repository, open it up, and build. 

I've only confirmed the remote to be compatible with Western Digital Live Hub devices, but it could be compatible with the rest of the WDTV line. I'm not sure, I don't have the others to test on. 

[cbaltzer]

Fixing OS X mouse acceleration

Seriously, it's terrible. What were they thinking? 

defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1

defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.trackpad.scaling -1

Where -1 can be any float, representing acceleration. I've read good values to try are 0.0625, or 0.03. I've yet to really experiment with this yet, since I'm on my laptop. I actually like the acceleration for the trackpad, so, I'll mess with it when I get my desktop up and running again. 

[cbaltzer]

Building Python libs with XCode 4

I've been having tons of trouble building Python libraries (pycurl and hiredis specifically) lately, and I've finally figured out why. XCode 4 no longer supports building for PPC, so easy_install fails. The easy way to fix this is to do:

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64" easy_install pycurl

But, this is a lot of extra overhead every time you want to install. To simplify this, just put the ARCHFLAGS into your .bash_profile:

export ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64"

However, we want this to carry over as sudo, so we'll add the following line to /etc/sudoers:

Defaults env_keep += "ARCHFLAGS"

This file is write protected (even as sudo?) so you'll get warnings when you try to save it. It should be okay though. I hope. Now you should be able to do a standard easy_install, and have it actually work. 

Note: If you copy any of the commands straight from this page, you'll probably get problems with the quotes. Type them in manually! 

[cbaltzer]

This is a small project I built based on my #movies project, to track peoples success in the Roll Up The Rim contest. The source is available here. 

[cbaltzer]

Does anyone know the name of this song? I found it on an oooold burnt CD (which was damaged, hence the poor quality). All I know is it's by Skratch Bastid. 

[cbaltzer]

DalCams v1.0 release

Well, the source has been up for a while, but it's finally polished enough for me to make a post about it. What is "it"? A little iPhone app I wrote which wraps the Dal FCS webcams. I'm not going to put it on the App Store unfortunately, as I'm not sure about using the streams/logos. Someone who knows about this, let me know! However, if you have Xcode and the iOS SDK you can build it yourself. The source is available on GitHub, here. 

The streams are obviously property[?] of Dalhousie. The logo is a modified version of the Dalhousie Computer Science Society logo. If there's any issue with me using this, let me know and I'll change it.

[cbaltzer]

Red birds escape from my wounds, And return as falling snow, to sweep the landscape a wind haunted. Wings without bodies.

Falling Snow - Agalloch