Books : Exploring the iPhone SDK & Development

Two new books about programming for iPhone are available : Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK (536 pages, 32 euros) and Beginning iPhone 2 Application Development: From Novice to Professional (350 pages).
We can also find Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone: Creating Compelling Dynamic User Interfaces (35$ or 22$ for PDF version). We can download source ode of the examples and access to a corresponding support forum.

Core Animation culling problems / 3D layers

On the Parmanoir blog (creator of JSCocoa), we can find a rework of the Core Animation NanoLife example originally developed by Theocacao’s Scott Stevenson (particles dispatched on animated layers, 80 total), as with goal to describe these particles in 3D. The encountered problem (layers ordering with the new z dimension, that is ignored by Core Animation) seems to have been resolved by Scott Stevenson (provided the fix), and Core Animation behaviour finally seems right.

The orginal article provides interesting informations on these subjects : Core Animation and Core Image filters, conversion between NSImage, CIImage, and CGImageRef, full screen mode for NSView.

iphone Powerboat Challenge/Armado & Meteor Lite

Among new games for iPhone at the AppStore we can find 3 interesting Lite (demo) versions : Powerboat Challenge Lite, a 3D boat racing game (that is an enhanced version of the mobile game, that brings 4 times more texture resolution and 3 times as many polygons. One race is available – 4 environments in the full game), a Lite version of Armado (that weights 36,6 Mb and includes 3 levels), and finally Meteor Lite, that brings 10 levels (90 levels in the full version).

iPhone 2.2 OS and SDK updates

A 2.2 update to iPhone OS is available. Among new features we note Google Street View, display of walking directions, share of location by email, access to podcast, a new search interface for Safari (as well as better performance and stability).
Apple also provides a new (2.2) corresponding iPhone SDK version (whose size – a bit more than 1,5 Gb – is larger than the previous).