I just sent out an email to all my beta testers. Peel 2.0 is mostly feature complete so I’ll be focusing on fixing bugs and fine tuning it. Please use the feedback option in Peel to report bugs because otherwise they might go unnoticed.

If you applied for beta testing and didn’t receive an email please let me know.

Hope you like it!

When creating a game you are usually working with a lot of resources and often you’ll be using dummy resources until the illustrator or the sound guy finishes his assets. This is fine, but as time goes you might end up with a project full of unused crap that only takes up precious space in your final product.

Before we submitted our latest game, Soft Freak Fiesta, I went through the project and removed everything that wasn’t used anywhere in the game. I was able to reduce the size of the game from 27 MiB down to 16 MiB. As you can imagine this is not the most fun task to do not mentioning that you’ll be scared to death that you’re removing something that you really shouldn’t.

So as a lazy programmer I wrote a Ruby script that scans an Xcode project and tries to find those unused files.

The script is very basic and by no means something you should rely on but it should give you some pointers. Keep in mind that it does not scan your Nib/Xib files so if you’re using UIKit/AppKit it will output false positives for files that are only referenced from your nibs.

To use it you point it at your project file and it should spit out a list of all files that are included in the project but not referenced from any source file. At the moment it looks for wav, png, pvr and caf files and searches h, m, c and cpp source files but you can of course customize that.

If you improve it (e.g. to scan nibs as well) I’d love to hear about it.

Get it here.

I’m back from San Francisco after getting my brain stuffed with so much material that it almost hurts. The conference was great and the people I met aswell but the food sucked (as expected). What I learned is that don’t hesitate to skip sessions for labs. The problem with the sessions was that they were often either too basic or too advanced.

Some sessions marked as ‘intermediate’ should have been filed under ‘beginner’ but I tried to leave those as soon as I got the idea of the material covered. On the other hand, the expert sessions were sometimes so hardcore that the engineers had to rush through the material to get everything done in time. I wouldn’t mind having some of those sessions a bit longer and at a decent pace.

However the labs rocked! Apple engineers are very, very nice people, both patient and willing to help. Talking to the person who made the stuff you are dealing with is invaluable.

Overall, I would highly recommend going to WWDC for any serious developer. Also, you are guaranteed to meet other like minded people, which is both useful and fun.

I’ll be attending WWDC for the first time this year, sucking in as much as I can in five days. It’s going to be a blast for sure. I haven’t decided what to see yet but at a quick glance it seems to be packed with both sessions and labs. If you are going aswell please leave me a comment, I’d love to meet up.

Sources tell me it sold out faster than ever and I’m guessing that the iPhone is playing a big role this year.

Interesting post describing the process we go through when creating a new game.

This means that ideas are very important to us. Polished game mechanics, innovative features and games that fit the intended platforms perfectly are all things that we look to incorporate in an initial idea. A lot of our time is spent on ideas. Everyone can participate and pitch their ideas. At any given time.

Available in iTunes Store

• Review by AppVee
• Review by RazorianFly

I just received the updated version of Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X written by Aaron Hillegass. I already owned the 2nd edition so I’m quite familiar with the book. I strongly recommend this book for anyone wanting to start developing for the Mac.

In my last article I mentioned how Mac applications tend to be more straight to the point. Tonight when I was reading through the updated HIG from Apple I stumbled upon this.

“During the design process, if you discover problems with your product design, you might consider applying the 80 percent solution—that is, designing your software to meet the needs of at least 80 percent of your users. This type of design typically favors simpler, more elegant approaches to problems.

If you try to design for the 20 percent of your target audience who are power users, your design may not be usable by the other 80 percent of users. Even though that smaller group of power users is likely to have good ideas for features, the majority of your user base may not think in the same way.”

Pretty much says it all.

CocoaDev just created a forum for all of us mac loving programmers. I’ve been wondering why there isn’t (or wasn’t) a forum for Cocoa developers ever since I started developing for the Mac. I even thought about creating my own but this is even better.

Go take a look.

Just updated Peel. Somehow a little bug that made the “Add to iTunes” function useless slipped into last build. More strangely nobody complained until just a few days ago.

I’ve also implemented a better registration method that only requires one click from the user. Since launching Peel I’ve been getting about one email a week from people who can’t register. Most of the time it’s because the they didn’t realize that the key needs a correct name and email to work. I’ve tried to guide them through the process as thorough as I can but sometimes that doesn’t cut it so I end up doing it manually and sending them the necessary files. I’m hoping my new registration method will solve this once and for all.

Fixed

• Adding songs manually to iTunes doesn’t work
• Sometimes HTML-tags slipped into the name (if no ID3 tag was found)

Added

• Better tag support. Now supports ID3v1 tags
• “One click” registration method

Head over to getpeel.com and grab the new version.