First, books!

We're very pleased to announce that our latest two books are now available! The first, Learning Cocoa with Objective-C Fourth Edition, is an update to our previous third edition book, this time co-written with our frequent collaborator and co-conspirator Tim Nugent. It covers everything existing programmers need to skill up with the latest in iPhone, iPad, and Mac development technologies. 

The second new book is the iOS Game Development Cookbook; it provides a huge range of recipes for common things you need to when building a game for iOS (or any other platform, if you're willing to translate the examples out of Cocoa and Objective-C, or even for things that aren't games if you're creative!)

We're really proud of both of these books, and hope you find them useful and enjoyable! Let us know what you think, or if you have any questions. You can find more details, and links to sample code, on our books page.

Second, training!

If you like our books, then why not try our training? Check out our previous blog post to learn more about our upcoming Melbourne iOS developer training.

Finally, conferences!

We're very pleased to be speaking at the (very awesome) O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) again this year – for the fourth time in a row! We'll be presenting our mobile app design workshop “Unfortunately, Design Tutorial Has Stopped”, and Other Ways to Infuriate People With Mobile Apps with frequent collaborator Chris Neugebauer, as well as the session How Do I Game Design?, exploring the basics of game design. 

Additionally, Tim Nugent (our co-author on the latest Learning Cocoa book) will be presenting the session My Friends Keep Leaving and it is Ruining Board Games Day, which explores the state of augmented and remote board gaming; Chris Neugebauer is also presenting the session Portable Logic/Native UI exploring best practices for building mobile apps that need to run on multiple platforms. It's all sure to be excellent! Do try it.

We made another nifty little extension!

UIView+BlurFade is an Objective-C category lets you take any UIView and make it blurry and greyscale. This is super useful for when you want to make a view look disabled, and looks really pretty to boot!

This category uses Core Image to perform the blurring and grey-scaling. Because you can't apply CIFilters to views on iOS, it actually cheats a little bit - instead of gradually blurring the view over time, it blurs it once, stores it in an image, and then fades that image over your original content.

To use this category, just drop the two files into your project and #import them. Then, when you want to make your view go blurry and faded out, you just do this:

To remove the blur effect, you call its counterpart:

We hope you find UIView+BlurFade useful! If you have any comments, either create an issue on GitHub, or shoot us an email!

SnapTas is a fun little app that we made earlier this month as part of the Go South Awards  competition, which is an app development competition down here that's run by the Tasmanian Government. We're pleased to announce that SnapTas won the business category of the competition! Congratulations also to Bappy Golder, who won the individual category in the competition!

If you were a VC we were pitching to, here's how we'd describe it: "Instagram, but for Tasmania, with retro travel post cards."

We made SnapTas because it's harder than it should be to find great examples of people sharing photos and content that shows off what makes Tasmania such a great place to live. Tasmania is world famous for its scenic environment and its high quality of life, and has hundreds of thousands of interstate and international visitors every year. Right now, though, the best way to find pictures that people have shared is to try searching for hashtags on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Every visitor has a different perspective on our beautiful island, and they enjoy sharing them with the world. SnapTas makes it easy to share and discover photos of Tasmania by creating a dedicated social network for both tourists and locals: when you're in Tasmania, take a photo or pick one from your camera roll, and SnapTas makes it look like a delightfully retro 1950's postcard. It's then shared with your Facebook friends, and you can also choose to make your photo available to everyone via the web.

For tourists, SnapTas is a way to share your trip to Tasmania. For locals, it’s a way to share your unique perspective on your home. SnapTas serves as a showcase of the best of Tasmania, and a single point to show potential visitors, or those want to move to our lovely island.

SnapTas also helps you share photos to Twitter and Facebook. The more people seeing Tasmania, the more people coming to visit and sharing their experience on SnapTas!

We used Parse for the backend of SnapTas, which handles user sign-up, data storage, push notifications, and all of the sharing, commenting and liking features. All of the images get rendered on the iPhone before being uploaded. 

SnapTas will be available to the public soon.

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ABC Play School Play Time, developed for the ABC by Secret Lab

Developed by Secret Lab for the ABC, Play School Play Time for iPad has hit the App Store this week! Let us know what you think!

This app contains some of the most interesting and complex use of Core Animation that we've ever done, and we're proud of how it's turned out. You can grab it from the App Store here, if you're in Australia, or here, if you're elsewhere!

If you haven't seen the previous app that we built for ABC Play School, also check out Play School Art Maker (Australia/other).

Update! As of 25 September 2013, the Play School Play Time app hit Number 1 in the App Store!

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National Science Week 2013 app by Secret Lab

We're incredibly pleased to be involved with National Science Week in Australia again this year. After building an app for the Tasmanian events last year, we were asked to create an app for the whole of Australia this year.

National Science Week 2013 app by Secret Lab

The app is now available on the iTunes App Store. Check it out, let us know what you think, and don't forget to take a look through the fantastic events that are being run as part of National Science Week 2013!

If you're running an event and need an app, we'd love to help.

We also ran our Android UX and development tutorial ("Level Up Your Apps: Mobile UX Design and Development") for the third year at OSCON! We had a great time presenting alongside our friend Chris Neugebauer (who devised much of the content).

Some links/information for those of you who are interested:

• Final APK (suitable for installing) of the OSCON 2013 app we built
• GitHub repository for the code from the tutorial
• The tags, corresponding in order to the start and finished states for the application: talk_listing_start, talk_listing_end, schedule_start, schedule_end, day_list_start, day_list_end, navigation_start, navigation_end, data_end, tabs_end, theme_start, theme_end, navigation_refresh, talk_listing_update, themeing_finished
• You can switch between these tags by using git reset --hard followed by git checkout and the name of the tag you want. Note that you will lose changes.

Slides are available on Speaker Deck:

Slides for OSCON 2013 Tutorial

If you have any questions or comments, please get in touch!