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This is a companion library for iOS development.
It provides utilities for a range of tasks, including Cryptography, JSON REST Web Services, UIKit, and Cocos2D.
Pearl is being actively developed as it provides the basis for the applications I write.
It was born from extracting generic components out of the Gorillas codebase and is currently being used by a range of applications including DeBlock, Task Assist and a few proprietary applications.
The Pearl API that exists is maturing and considered Beta-quality. New API is added every now and then.
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Abstract Application Delegate:
Provides a good basis for your application delegate and works well with the Configuration framework. Also registers for notifications should you choose to enable support for that. -
Configuration:
A configuration singleton provides dead-easy NSUserDefaults-backed strongly typed property-based configuration. Extend a class, add properties to your header and @dynamic to your implementation, done. -
Logging:
Log events and messages at different levels, automatically recording the source code line that logged it. Obtain logs in code or output all above a certain level to the console. -
Cryptography:
Simple hashing, encrypting and decrypting of arbitrary data. -
UIKit:
Many UIKit utilities for things such as automatic UIScrollView content management and keyboard handling, validating text fields, laying out UIViews, scaling images, etc. -
Web Services:
JSON-based REST Web Service class to make web services trivial for you. Works best with JLibs’ JSONResult. -
Objects:
Lots of utilities for dealing with all sorts of objects such as strings, dates, datas, etc. Also includes macros for things like making vararg methods trivial to use, etc. -
Audio:
Configuration-based music manager and easy sound effects management. -
Cocos2D Layers:
Animating loading/aiming bar, Node scrolling (like UIScrollLayer), flicking and swiping, Automatic Menu/Configuration menu generation. -
Cocos2D Actions:
Modify arbitrary properties in combination with other cocos2d-iphone Actions such as Ease actions.
There are a few game development frameworks for iOS, and developers can also just use OpenGL/ES and the other low-level APIs directly.
Cocos2D-iPhone is the library I have chosen because it is very much alive, has a strong and growing community and provides in most all needs of basic and more advanced game development with a healthy and usable API.
These shots demonstrate Pearl features in the Deblock game.
Menus are built through a simple API. You mention the title strings, the callback to invoke when the user taps the menu item, and the item layout on screen. You can even specify a logo.
self.pausedMenu = [MenuLayer menuWithDelegate:self logo:[MenuItemImage itemFromNormalImage:@"title.game.paused.png"
selectedImage:@"title.game.paused.png"]
items:
[MenuItemFont itemFromString:l(@"menu.level.restart")
target:self selector:@selector(levelRedo:)],
[MenuItemSpacer spacerSmall],
[MenuItemFont itemFromString:l(@"menu.main")
target:self selector:@selector(stopGame:)],
[MenuItemFont itemFromString:l(@"menu.game.end")
target:self selector:@selector(endGame:)],
nil];
This menu is built from a given set of properties defined in the Configuration backend.
self.configMenu = [ConfigMenuLayer menuWithDelegate:self logo:nil
settings:
@selector(music),
@selector(soundFx),
@selector(compete),
nil];
The following score list is built using a ScrollLayer. This allows the user to scroll through the list as though it’s a normal UIScrollView in a very intuitive way with the same fluent feel.
This allows users to flick through a set of layers much the same way as the Scroll Layer works (it extends the Scroll Layer).
