SOTC Recent Posts

SOTC Episode 5 - What Does Marsellus Wallace Look Like?

The Reddest — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:40:11 +0000

After a few-month hiatus, the team is back for another installment of Switch On The Code. In this episode Charlie Key and Brandon Cannaday discuss college senior CS projects, Visual Studio 2010 beta 2, Twitter Lists, Adobe CS5, Google Wave, Windows 7, Lua, and iPhone development tools.

Audio Downloads:

SOTC Episode 5 - What Does Marsellus Wallace Look Like.mp3

Using Shark to Performance Tune Your iPhone App

The Reddest — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:38:28 +0000

Here was the problem: we were working on an OpenGL iPhone game and for some reason the frame rates were unusually low - especially for what little action was happening on the screen at the time. My first plan of attack was to begin commenting out chunks of the system in an attempt to see what module was causing the problem. I removed the physics, the logic updates, and some of the things being rendered. Nothing I did, however, seemed to create a noticeable improvement in performance.

C++ & Lua - Function Arguments

The Hairiest — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:37:23 +0000

As we have been realizing here at SOTC, using Lua with C++ is really the only way to make Lua work for you. Lua itself is really not that useful, but used in conjunction with other languages, it can be quite powerful. It past tutorials, we have gone over how to use Lua with C++. However, we have yet to go over how to pass arguments back and forth between the two. This is what we will cover today.

C++ & Lua - Functions

The Hairiest — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:27:45 +0000

So in our last Lua tutorial, we went over a basic way to get information from lua and use it inside C++ code. This time, we are going to use the same principals to run a lua function from C++ and a C++ function from lua. This opens up endless possibilities for communication between the two. So, how about we get started then.

Finding Memory Leaks in iPhone Code

The Fattest — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:30:21 +0000

The video tutorial below shows how to use the performance tools that come with the Apple development kit to find memory leaks in Cocoa and Cocoa Touch code.

AppKiDo - Making Cocoa Touch Documentation More Accessible

The Fattest — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:54:16 +0000

I enjoy writing applications for the iPhone, not because I like Objective-C or Xcode but I really like seeing the application on my phone. This means I have to endure the other two. Being fairly new to the Cocoa and Objective-C world I spend a fair amount of time in documentation. This is always a mundane task but Xcode just makes it a completely bad experience. Recently I ran across an application that improves the task. The application is called AppKiDo.

Lua & C++ - The Basics

The Hairiest — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:18:19 +0000

With Lua, almost anything is possible. It is akin to JS, but in some ways it is so much more powerful. With World of Warcraft incorporating Lua right into its core, you have to wonder how powerful you can actually make it. One of the things that make Lua so powerful is its easy integration into C++ and C. With this integration, you can accomplish just about anything. Today, we are going to go through the steps to get some basic interaction between C++ and Lua.

Creating a REST Client using WCF

The Reddest — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:56:25 +0000

A couple of weeks ago we received an email about consuming a REST service in WCF. Well, this tutorial should answer that email. Today we're going to build a simple client for Twitter's REST API using WCF.

Since it doesn't look like WCF natively support OAuth authentication, the client we're going to write will do one simple thing - request the latest status updates for a specific user. I'm going to write a command line application that asks for a username and then prints a bunch of status updates along with information about the user. Below is some example output.

Lua - Simple Tables

The Hairiest — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 02:05:02 +0000

Anyone who plays World of Warcraft and does even the slightest of development knows that Lua is an integral part of its core. It is so important in fact, that Lua can be interpreted from right inside the game itself. Now, besides WoW, Lua is used throughout the gaming world in a host of ways, typically for the UI. This makes Lua something some of us would like to learn about. Today, we are going to take the first step in Lua development and going over the powerful table.

jQuery Snippet - The e.preventDefault() Function

The Hairiest — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:31:15 +0000

Using the mouse in jQuery is really easy, and opens up a whole new world for those who use javascript. But, just about everything already has a mouse event attached to it. Images are especially tricky, usually allowing click-and-dragging by default. Today we will go over a useful function that will help you take control over just what the mouse button does on certain elements.