kooworx blog

The blog page has been moved.

I moved this blog to the /blog directory, the new web site is coming soon.

Connecting letters and making words in a new way, it’s full of fun! Here comes the full version of Word Connect – an addictive word game!

The rules are simple, you just need to use the given letters to make words, as many as you can, but the letters must be placed in a single line. The words you made should have the minimum size of 3 letters. (In the Four Limit game type, you must made words with at least 4 letters)

Each round you’ll get seven letters, each letter must be inserted into the line. Once you’ve made a word, the letters that made up the word will be lighted up. A game round will be ended when you inserted all the seven letters, then the words you made will be calculated. Try to make more words in a round. If you lighted up all the seven words, you’ll get score bonus.

In the full version, there are three types of Word Connect game included:

1 – Endless. Play as long as you can, try to beat the highest score!

2 – 50 Rounds. Play for 50 Rounds to see how much you can get.

3 – Four Limited. You must made words with at least 4 letters, this is endless, too.

One thing more. There is an automatic saving function implemented. So you can just close the game and continue to play next time. But when you continue playing a saved game, the saved progress will be cleared, new progress will be saved when you pass current round.

So, let’s make some words!

The full version features:
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* Online global leaderboards and achievements plus Facebook and Twitter integration, courtesy of OpenFeint.
* Four leaderboards to challenge.
* 18 achievements to be unlocked!
* Automatic save game progress.
* Sound and background music support.
* Smooth animation.

Just enjoy the game!


Continue reading »

This app will tell you what’s your Chinese name is. You can search the name database to find out, and then save it as your favorite. You can display it as a name tag to tell everybody your Chinese name with customized colors!

Features:

- Search from 7500+ English names.
- Save as favorite name to be displayed later.
- Show your English or Chinese name as a name tag.
- Customize the colors of your name tag.

New names will be added constantly via updates.


Continue reading »

Today, our app Chinese Girl – Gallery Of Tina is Ready For Sale, please visit our app page to check it out! Click Here to go!

If your game do not require the user to interactive with the touch screen, say for example you only use accelerometer for moving your sprite. You’ll notice that the iPhone will go sleeping after a while. We don’t like this, so, you can add this to prevent it from sleeping:

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[UIApplication sharedApplication].idleTimerDisabled = YES;

That will be all.

In my last project, I used more than 100 images. It’s OK while I was testing it on the simulator. But when I uploaded it onto the device, it crashed all the time. I check the crash log, it showed as “low memory”.

I used this to load image:

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singleImageView = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"test.jpg"]];

When I run it with Instruments, I noticed that the use of the memory were increasing very fast and seemed to be not released. That's why the app crashed and through out a 101 error. It looks like that the imageNamed will cache images in the memory and only release the memory while the app terminate. Then I use imageWithContentsOfFile for a replacement of imageNamed:

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NSString* str = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"test.jpg" ofType:nil inDirectory:@""];
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singleImageView = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:str]];
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The problem solved! You can see the snapshot of Instruments below, the memory were released when I changed to another category.



The imageWithContentsOfFile might be slower than imageNamed, but it is worthy to use it.

While, as we all know, OS 3.0 has been installed or upgraded on most of the iPhones, but, there are still a lot of iPod Touch not upgraded. So, by now, we still need to develop our apps based on the OS 2.2+ then try to make it compatible with OS 3.0.

When we test our apps on OS 2.2+ and OS 3.0, we found out that some thing different in the two platforms, so if your want the same code to be built for different OS, here is the trick to do it.

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- (void)viewDidLoad {
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#ifdef __IPHONE_3_0
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	NSInteger offset = -40;
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#else
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	NSInteger offset = 0;
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#endif
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	/* Your code here */
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	[super viewDidLoad];
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}

You can notice that we used pre-processor directives for the conditional compilation. But there is still a problem: we have to build two binaries for the different OS. What if we want to build only one binary that can be compatible with both platforms?

This code will do it for you: Continue reading »

Hi folks, this is the very first post in this newly created blog. We’ll put some stuff about what happened during our development of iPhone applications.

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NSLog(@"Hello world from kooworx");