April 2011
Intermediate to advanced
80 pages
2h
English
Content preview from Writing Game Center Apps in iOSBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 1. Game Center
Game Center is the Apple technology that allows game developers to integrate leaderboards, achievements, and multiplayer support, among other things, into their iOS apps. Why is it so important? Simply because Apple takes care of the server infrastructure of Game Center for you! Apple also provides iOS developers with a framework, called GameKit, to make Game Center integration into iOS Apps really easy.
Introducing GCD and Block Objects
Problem
You want to learn how to use block objects and Grand Central Dispatch so that you can write Game Center apps in iOS.
Solution
Learn the basics of block objects and Grand Central Dispatch here.
Discussion
All of us, at some point, have used threads. We use threads to separate the paths of execution in our code and to give priority to certain paths of execution over others. A classic example of this is the main UI thread in every iOS application. All iOS developers are encouraged to avoid keeping the UI thread busy for work that is non-UI-related, in order to sustain a responsive user interface. Therefore, all work that is not UI-related can, and indeed should, be executed in separate threads.
With the introduction of multicore mobile devices such as the iPad 2, threads and their management have become more complicated than ever before. Not only should developers know what path of execution is running at any instance, they should also know which core of the processor that path is running on in order to utilize the power of the ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.