CartoonSmart’s first Maya and first donation-priced tutorial

Back from the grave (actually just back from getting his Masters) is one of CartoonSmart’s first instructor’s besides yours truly. Manuel D’Macedo has returned relatively unscathed from years of being immersed in the Maya environment, and the teacher turned student turned back to teacher is back in the CartoonSmart fold.

To welcome his return, and to introduce as many of you as possible to Maya and 3D design, I’m setting the price of this nearly 3 hour lesson to either $0.99 (the “I’m Broke” Level), $4.99 (the “I Can Meet You Halfway”  Level”) or $9.99 (the “I Fully Support More 3D Lessons” Level). And don’t worry, I won’t secretly be judging any orders that come in for 99 cents.  I’m just excited to offer something new, and I’d like as many new students as possible here.

This Introduction to Maya video series will be housed under CartoonSmart’s ever growing list of sister-domains “CartoonSmart3d.com“. Actually, I’ve had that domain for probably 10 years now, so its nice to finally use it.

Thanks for listening!

Apple rejecting apps with uniqueIdentifier (used in CocosLive from older Cocos2d templates)

Here’s what an emailer told me yesterday: he’s gotten his app rejected a couple times with this somewhat mysterious reason….

• Apps are not permitted to access the UDID and must not use the uniqueIdentifier method of UIDevice. Please update your apps and servers to associate users with the Vendor or Advertising identifiers introduced in iOS 6.

Actually it’s not all that mysterious. If you have an older Cocos2d project which included the CocosLive classes you might have noticed a deprecation warning a while back saying something like “uniqueIdentifier is deprecated”. Deprecations are like the Yield Signs of coding. A lot of times you just slow down and don’t stop. Especially if you think its something that will be solved in the next update of the framework you are using. And as it turns out more recent versions of Cocos2d don’t have CocosLive included.

So this issue would only be a problem if you were using an older project. Chances are the quick fix is to just trash the entire cocoslive folder in your libs folder in Xcode, and hopefully you’ll be good to go. I can’t say for sure yet, that this solved this guy’s problem because it’ll be another week probably before Apple will review his app again, but I think this will do the trick.

Busy, busy month.

I’ve disappeared a bit from blogging recently, but no, I haven’t taken 6 weeks off. I wish. Actually, no, I don’t wish. I love working which is partially why I’ve been absent here. I just get hyper focused and forget to attend to all my duties. So recent news…

Story Tellers iOS Starter Kit 

I added quite a bit to this in the past few weeks. Past buyers all should have gotten an email. One minor change, but very worth noting. The most recent Cocos2d library made the switch from using the extension -widehd.png to -iphone5hd.png for Retina Display images on the iPhone 5 . If you don’t include separate images specifically for the iPhone 5, your fallback extension is still the same, -hd.png, which is probably what most of you are using anyway.  There really shouldn’t be too many reasons to include unique images for both devices, unless of course it’s a background image, but even then you could have the -hd.png image wider than necessary for the iPhone 4  and just plan on it being cropped some.  Personally, I liked the -widehd.png extension more than -iphone5hd.png  since it seems inevitable to change one day (ahem, iPhone 6).

And the bigger news is that the Story Teller’s Kit now supports 5 in-app purchases, images that can be shown or not-shown based on in-app purchases,  Facebook posting, Streaming Video (instead of just video files added to the Resource folder of the kit), slide-up style menus with thumbnails, and some extra nice things like adding an array to the Root of the Plist to house images which will appear on every page of the book (good for menu buttons). The Facebook / Twitter posting feature also includes an option to attach an image to the post, which could be used to promote your app. For example, you could include a screen shot from the app. You can find out more details at the fancy new-ish looking page for the Kit…

iOS Game Programming with Xcode and Cocos2d

Some of you might have noticed this got a brand spanking new chapter added. Chapter 10 got bumped up to Chapter 11, and Chapter 10 is now….

Ch.10 Extending Cocos2d

• 10.1 - Connecting to Twitter or Facebook (iOS 6)
• 10.2 - Connecting to Twitter (iOS 5)
• 10.3 - Saving the Screen to the Camera Roll
• 10.4 - Adding Video
• 10.5 - Quick Start Guide to In-App Purchasing
• 10.6 - The In-App Purchasing Classes (fully explained)
• 10.7 - NSURL and UIAlertView

If you bought the book in it’s native iBook format from the iBookstore, you should have an update awaiting you. For my PDF people, you should have gotten an email with a download link for the update.

What Else?… Oh yeah, BootStrap. 

Click above if you don’t know what Twitter Bootstrap is. It’s a lot of CSS and Javascript to make pretty websites basically. I finally buckled down and started playing with some new layout and designs for CartoonSmart. And once I got a look I was satisfied with, I went from very happy to very overwhelmed as I realized it would take me a year to retool the entire site with fresh pages. The “entire site” is a bit of a stretch, so I’ll be starting with sister-sites like CartoonSmartKits.com, CartoonSmartCode.com, and CartoonSmartBooks.com . Basically I’ve committed to watching TV at night in zombie-mode tediously beautifying old sales pages for the next billion shows I “hear”. Fortunately I’ve got a wife that doesn’t mind me asking “wait, what’s happening?” every 15 minutes.

So that’s the latest news. On the near-horizon, we’ve got an Intro to Maya lesson! Hizzah! Some 3D again!

Justin Cook’s Kickstarter Project has room for YOU in it…

Justin Cook (a regular CartoonSmart instructor) has a great new project on Kickstarter, but before I introduce it,  let’s address this…

What the heck is Kickstarter??

Kickstarter is NOT a donation website. It’s about pre-selling a product so the creator knows there’s enough interest out there to actually make the project worth doing. Believe me, it sucks spending months on something that no one buys. 

What’s the project??

So Justin’s Kickstarter is a How to Draw Caricatures book which could potentially FEATURE YOU in it. For 7 pounds (or about $11) you’ll get the book in beautiful iBook format or PDF.  But if you feel like pledging just a tad bit more, you’ll get to be in the book itself!  The pledge levels for being in the actual book start at just 10 pounds, and increase based on how featured you are, up to being on the front cover. Here’s an example…

Cool right? I’ll let you find out more on Kickstarter!

 

The First 3 Listeners added to the Story Tellers Kit…

You can add the Listeners array to your Story Tellers kit to “listen” for certain events. When a completion event occurs, you can trigger something to happen.  The kit currently supports listening for these events…

PairingCompleted -  Listen for a certain number of base and puzzle/sticker pieces to be paired together. For example, once 12 pieces are put in place, you can shoot off fireworks and add an image saying “Go to Next Page” .

TouchCountByTag – Listen for a specific number of touches on a group of ImageOverlays. These images don’t have to look the same, they simply need to share the same Tag property. ImageOverlays all have Tag property, which up till now has mostly been ignored in this documentation. For example, touching any image 5 times with the Tag set 999, could automatically go to the next page.

RemovalOfImagesByTag -  Similar to the previous listener, you can listen for the removal of images with a specific Tag number. For example, removing 10 images with the Tag set to 888, could show a video.

If you are updating your kit from version 1.4 to 1.5, all you need to do is copy and paste what’s in Page.h and Page.m to your copy of the kit. And then to add a listener, you can copy and paste the Listeners array from the BookSetup.plist (the main property list).

The documentation for the kit now has a fancy Listeners section added to it. Enjoy…

Listen up! I’m looking for Listener ideas for the StoryTeller’s kit…

Alright, kit-sters! I’m looking for ideas for the StoryTellers iOS Starter Kit. I’m adding an optional Listeners section to the Property List. So for example, if you want to “listen out” for a puzzle being completed,  you can do that (after the next update of the kit). You can see how this will be setup in the image from the property list below. Pretty easy right. If 12 pieces are put in place, we add fireworks to the scene.

So far I’ve added two other listeners, one which listeners for tapping of an object (or group of objects) by tag. Anyone familiar with the kit knows that you don’t have to add a tag (numerical ID) to your images, but it was possible to. Now if you add a tag, for example “999″, you can listen out for touches to any image with that tag. And multiple images can have the same tag. So essentially its a group.  And if you touch them enough times, like 20 times, you could trigger something to happen. Like adding fireworks to the scene.

Also there’s a removal listener which works the same way. If x number of images are removed, something occurs.

More ideas?? Email me. I’d love to hear what you’re doing with the kit, and where’s there’s room for some custom coding that everyone can benefit from.

Also, the most recent documentation (1.4) is in the iBookstore. If your country is among those that can access the iBookstore, this is the best copy to download because when there’s an update to the kit itself, I’ll also update the documentation and you’ll be notified via your iBooks app.

New Tutorial on How to Draw Cartoon Animals!

The Great Paris Christou is back! This outing he’s tackling dozens of animals in his aptly named course, How to Draw Cartoon Animals. If you purchase now, you’ll also got a $5 discount coupon off your next CartoonSmart tutorial (the code is in a text document along with your download links to the movie files)

As it says above, he’s traveling to 5 different environments for this course. House Pets, The Farm, The Forest, The Jungle and the Sea. Like his past lessons, Paris illustrates using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 6, but you can follow along with any artistic software on your desktop, pencil and paper, or using an app on your iPad.

Side note: This course inspired me to buy a stylus for my iPad. I got this one by Trent off Amazon. I had one in the past with a very rubbery tip, it was “okay”, but this new one is incredible. It has some kind of fabric tip that makes it very smooth to draw with. So now I have one more thing distracting me from actually watching the television: sketching caricatures constantly during shows. So now I can draw the people on Dateline, that I may or may not utterly despise. I let the jury decide.