Editorial note: Yesterday, I sent a draft of this post to Mattt Thompson, the author of the article this is a reply to. He was kind enough to send a very gracious reply. I thought about reformulating the post in an attempt to express or explain our differences of opinion more directly, but decided that I would be doing him a disservice by doing so. Instead, with his permission, this post contains my original draft, followed by his reply. Please do read both.

Coolson’s Artisanal Chocolate Alphabet, our iPad game, has been out for almost a month now! (You should buy it before it goes up in price on Friday :-).

This is the first of hopefully at least a couple ‘behind the scenes’ blog posts about its creation. This one’s about its trailer video, and how we made it on a budget of $0 ¹.

Background

We submitted Coolson’s to the App Store in mid July, hoping it would be reviewed in a week or so, and knowing we’d need to have some publicity and marketing materials ready. The most pressing thing to do was create a web page. All the best game web pages have a great trailer in them, so that people can get an idea of how the game feels to play - and hopefully be enticed to buy it. A good trailer can also be great for word-of-mouth publicity - people can send it to friends or post it on Facebook or Twitter.

What a week it’s been. What a few months, really!

If you’ve been following on Twitter or this blog recently, you’ll know that my wife Emily and I have been working on an iPad game. We’ve been testing it for a month or two with a great group of people, who have been a great help (thanks to all of them).

The game, Coolson’s Artisanal Chocolate Alphabet, is now done, and available to buy (that was a hint). We’re really pleased with how it turned out.

I open-sourced a little bit of, as I’ve been calling it on Twitter, “THE GAME” - that is, the game Em and I’ve been working on: “THIn”: Three easy ways to do things later in Cocoa/Cocoa Touch.

I wrote some key-value observing (KVO) and key-value binding (KVB) helper classes for iOS and Mac OS X. Not much more to say about them than is in the ReadMe file on GitHub. I’m pleased with them. Comments (and pull requests) welcome.

Google has acquired the development team that produces the excellent Mac and iPhone email app Sparrow. Development of the app is being stopped so that the developers can “[join] the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision.”

Like many, I find this news disappointing. I bought both the iPhone and Mac versions of Sparrow. I use it daily on my iPhone, and intermittently on my Mac. It’s a great app on both platforms. I’ve been very happy with my purchase so far, but I have to admit I felt a little betrayed when I heard the news of the acquisition.

I posted YACYAML, the Cocoa YAML parser/object archiver I’ve been working on for a little while to GitHub today. It converts Cocoa objects to and from YAML, a plain text, human friendly data serialization format.

YACYAML can be used in lots of ways - from replacing plists or JSON for simple config files, up to storing entire custom documents in an easy to view (and easy to hand-edit) format.

Why have I made this?

The short answer is that I like YAML. It’s ‘nicer’ than plists and JSON to edit, and it’s far, far, nicer to look at than NSKeyedArchiver’s binary representation (which, to be fair, wasn’t meant to be human-readable in the first place, but I think it would be good if it was).

It’s commonly held that iOS has no built in Base64 routines (a strange omission, if you ask me). Pootling around in the BSD headers today though, I discovered this is not entirely true. There are a couple of functions hidden away in libresolv.dylib. That’s the, err, BIND-9 DNS resolution library… If you’re not put off by linking to BIND just to get Base64 translation, it’s easy to use. Here’s the interface (publicly declared in a less readable fashion in resolv.h):

This “Don’t Learn to Code” vs. “Everyone Should Learn to Code” meme fascinates me. I pretty much agree with everything Buzz says.