Been a while since I last posted. I decided to shift gears a bit thanks to Keith Peters and his iPhone tutorial. I have always wanted to get into iPhone development but the weirdness of Objective C scared me away twice before. Luckily, Keith’s easy to follow 5 step blog post helped me to get my foot in the door and Objective C for the Mac helped me to push the rest of my body through.
It is still a mess of a language to come to from Java but I am starting to like some of the nuances. Hopefully in a few days I can have something to show but for now, its all just a basic sketch. I have ported over the Particle Source I posted a while ago. The framerate suffers a lot, for sure, but OpenGLES is robust enough for me to do most of what I need to do. Once I get a better idea of how to offload the heavy lifting to straight C, I think I can squeeze a few extra FPS out of the application.
Not sure where I am going with it in the long run. The only goal I had up front is to get more familiar with the iPhone development process. In a perfect world, I would be able to make a nice audio visualizer for songs being played in iPhone but as far as I can tell, it is not possible for me to analyze music coming out of the iTunes application. All I have right now is particle emitters that correspond with the multitouch screen. They are loaded pngs. I am using blending modes to get the glow. I have also connected the particles to the emitters with stroke tethers.
I will post screengrabs and video once I get to a place that makes me happy. And in a small handful of weeks, App Store here I come!