I, for the most part, am not the type to write long drawn out blog entries about specific development technologies. That being said I am going to break character a bit and write a little about Cocos2d for IPhone. I have experimented with a few different game development APIs/Frameworks for the IPhone & IPod Touch and have come to the assertion that for me Cocos2d is the easiest and quickest way to get a nonstandard Touch application up and running.
BTW: I wont be giving any sort of C, Obj-C or XCode primer so before I start my second post on this thread go out and google up some Obj-C and XCode goodness. I will also not be going into introduction of OpenGL ES because there are volumes written on the subject. I like Jeff Lemarche's OpenGL ES from the ground up series. It is a great introduction to OpenGL ES written specifically for IPhone/IPod Touch by someone who writes books on the subject of IPhone development specifically.
Cocos2d for IPhone is an open source project under the GNU LGPL hosted on google code at cocos2d-iphone. It is a port of the Cocos2d Python framework re-implemented in the Objective-c programming language for use on the IPhone and IPod Touch by Ricardo Quesada and company. Go thank them and contribute, they deserve it.
Cocos2d sits on top of OpenGL ES abstracting away most of the more tedious time consuming aspects of OpenGl based 2d programming. Fact is you can use the framework without writing a lick of OpenGL rendering code. You can also dip down into the lower levels of the framework and change the underlaying OpenGL calls as all of the source code for the framework is at your disposal in the distribution.
My little ramblings about Cocos2d do not live in a vacuum. There are many other blog based Cocos2d programming tutorials covering basic usage, project creation and XCode integration, and even some fully implemented game source code to learn from. They are written by much more notable IPhone dev community members than I (The list of links above is not exhaustive). I will cover some of the same material but will be more concerned with looking at the architecture, object model and implementation details of the framework than creating an operational game. I will try to post at least once a week day job, side job and family permitting.
As you can probably see by this initial post I am a little hyperlink happy. I have a preference to linking directly to content specific to subject matter rather than paraphrase some other persons more thorough explanation. Please forgive this habit in advance.
Kenneth A. Barber
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