Tap, Move, Shake: Turning Your Game Ideas into iPhone & iPad Apps 1st Edition

This is the first book I have seen in XCode/ObjectiveC that takes the submission to the App store as important a learning step as is the process of writing code. I loved the give and take App store rejection emails that provided a lot of insight for anyone who is going to submit an app the first time.Also insightful is the special effort in giving the coder who is light on media creation great chapters on creating graphics and sound. Links provided are well researched.On the wish list for me was not to dismiss ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) at the onset. Gee the book kinda assumes the beginner and ARC leans to that. But I suspect a case of examples completed at a time Apple was busy upsetting the cart for writers in progress.A personal negative item, that PUBLISHERS SHOULD ENFORCE, is formatting easy to spot steps for those who want the experience of typing in code and filling out the dialog screens. Code was easy to follow although a couple of places where bold was missing as how you would identify changes to code and warning appeared where you need to include methods in the header file. But there are a number of paragraphs with multiple steps dealing with UI dialogs. Credit is given here in Interface Builder as some effort has completed screen shots - the BEST SOLUTION. Suggestions I have are one step per paragraph, show all final filled out dialogs, a list of properties and values changed in a dialog, or use numbered steps.As well in the negative column is progress projects. On the positive side the segments in the chapters are extremely well thought out especially the progression of development. However if you make a blunder like missing a minus somewhere, you can only proceed with the error haranguing you as you move forward. Again this is a PUBLISHER SOP that should be ENFORCED.I wish IPad was included but also glad that both were not attempted in the same book. So that is not a negative, but a I wish there is an IPad book equivalent from Todd which I would buy.The negatives however are not enough to skip this book even if you are going for IPad. I take 1 point off because I think the efficiency of the reader trying to do hands on needs to be optimized. Kinda hard nosed about it and have many books in IOS that I started and realized the efficiency to follow is so slow by poor formatting I would never finish even 1/3 of the book. This one because of the positives I will make it. Starting on the Nok Hockey game soon.I think you need a basic skill in XCode and Objective C to follow the book. XCode is introduced nicely for beginners and Objective C is learned more by example and less by explanation. I could not have solved some bugs without a basic skill in Objective C. The architecture of IOS app is explained well. I loved the clarity of explaining the bootstrap of an IOS app. I finally got it!The book covers EVERYTHING you need from setting up for development, coding, basic testing, resource creation, app submission and even app marketing. All at a very clear to the point approach. The book examples make you feel you are starting at the beginning because they are from the gaming industry beginnings tuned to the phone.This is 254 page book that has a good number of images taking up pages. Compared to 3 and 4 inch opus magnum IOS books out there that are OMGs difficult to hold open on the desk or in a lounge chair, Todd gets a great deal done as a focused writer. Cutting content is key. I rather buy more books than have big monsters.Finally the apps in the book are IN THE APP STORE. Never saw that trick before and I think is a standard for anyone writing IOS books. I actually followed the steps of creating an app I could download suffice it had a tad more flash in the store.Want to get started in IOS gaming without a gaming engine or better understand your gaming engine, then do this book.

If you're an aspiring iOS game developer, this book is a good place to start.It walks you through creating a single simple iPhone game, Air Hockey, from concept to submission to the Apple App Store.The text is clear and concise but not dry. It reads fast. There appear to be no nontrivial errors.The approach is incremental, with each chapter building on the previous. The coding of each feature is explained, then demonstrated.The author coded against Xcode 4.2. His example code worked using Xcode 4.4.1, without debugging, with two minor warnings and some minor differences in generated template code.The author's code emphasizes simplicity rather than optimal performance; for example, some unnecessary instantiation of temporary objects. The lack of curly braces under single-line if statements and loops is evil!The app architecture uses the nib approach to GUI implementation, as opposed to hard coding everything or using Storyboards.The focus is on creation of the game, not iOS app architecture. For example, the puck and paddle objects are really controllers in that they control their respective nib-implemented views.That being said, the book does walk you from the main entry point, main(), through the AppDelegate, into your own code; providing a solid understanding of how things hang together.The author's use of the term Artificial Intelligence may be a bit overstated here in that the play-against-the-computer version does not learn anything. However, given the current state of game AI, that is probably a semantic quibble.What was particularly useful:The chapter on app submission is clear and thorough. (He has multiple apps in the App Store.) It not only walks you through the submission process, but through the steps necessary to prepare your app for submission, including gotchas. His examples of rejection notices from Apple, their reasons, and their resolutions are brilliant.Getting inside the author's head as he makes design and coding decisions is also brilliant. Either he had an outstanding editor or the man can just communicate, because there's a lot of substance in a minimum of words.His tuning of the AI to make the game more enjoyable was enlightening.His step by step development of a simple state machine is a great introduction to that architecture.His sometimes subtle solutions were enlightening, such as using View tags in lieu of explicit variables for code simplicity, or his object layout solution to facilitate game play.His identification and resolution of some iOS anomalies, such as in touch handling could save you some time.The explanation of how to develop for the Retina display is so succinct that it took several readings to comprehend how simple it can be.The introduction to Xcode was helpful, even for someone with moderate familiarity with that tool. After reading that section, you might find your XCoding more efficient.The chapters on graphics creation via Fireworks, and sound creation and editing using Audacity proved useful and informative, even to an experienced game content creator. There are some good references to content sources.For beginning developers (and, alas, some who should know better) his practical suggestions for file management and version numbering could be useful.He gives some useful tips on debugging, too.Some things it explicitly does not cover:- Automatic Reference Counting (ARC)- StoryboardingTemplates other than Single View are not explored. Specifically, OpenGL ES is not used.The book's title is a bit misleading in that the shake gesture is barely mentioned and has no real part in the game.The book really does not address the iPad explicitly, though all of the above can be applied to that device.If you want to learn the fundamentals of iOS app, not just game, development, good complementary works are Aaron Hillegass' Objective-C Programming and Beginning iOS 5 Development, by Mark, Nutting, and LaMarche.However, if you want to dive directly into iOS game development, this book is a very good place to start.

I agree a lot with Alonzo's review (also 4 stars). The book is very readable and one of the few development books I have read from start to finish in under a week, including entering all the code. I really enjoyed Todd's writing, especially his discussions of how he went through the computer AI logic. He walks you through all phases of the development, including creating graphics and sounds from scratch....all the way to submitting to the app store. Definitely a worthwhile read. I also found almost no errors in the code (i think there's a synthesis missing in the computer AI section, but nothing else that I saw).On the down side (and why not 5 stars): even though the book was published in Dec 2011, it doesn't use ARC. And, there is virtually no iPad information in the book - everything is developed for the iPhone. That's ok, except the title of the book greatly implies that it covers iPad apps as well. A chapter converting the iPhone app to work on the iPad would have been great. Or change the title of the book.Overall, I do highly recommend this book - I learned a lot writing the code and you really understand how Todd developed a complete game from concept through delivery to the app store. Update it with ARC and add an iPad chapter and it would be perfect.

This is the ideal book to just go through the process of building a fairly simple game on an iPhone or iPad. It is very good. So why only 3 stars. Even though the book is not that old it is showing its age. Even though I have just finished the first basic game there are clearly things that have changed and mean that it will not work exactly as written. For the beginners this is aimed at this could prove very frustrating, for competent coders just a little.An iOS 6 version of the book would probably have got 5 stars.