iT2D suitable for a catalogue ?
by Andy Rollins · in iTorque 2D · 02/01/2011 (4:42 am) · 4 replies
I work for a Kitchen Company who deal with the building trade, we have lots of glossy catalogues that get printed several times a year and I've been asked to investigate the possibility of moving these onto mobile devices.
So I've been given a MacBook Pro by work to do some R&D on what it would take to get a catalogue app built for an iPhone --- now I'm a PC guy so it's fun getting used to Mac and Xcode and I'm starting to work through learning objective-C and the iOS SDK.
I wondered given its price drop now whether iT2D would be suitable to pull together a quick prototype of a catalogue, for example:
- Display a range of categories (contemporary kitchen, traditional kitchens, appliances, etc)
- Show kitchen ranges within category
- For a range display some background images (maybe animated) with a little blurb about the items
Wondering given my knowledge of Torque (albeit the 3D versions of the engines and not 2D) whether it would be a quicker route to prototype something than working through objective-C, interface builder, iOS SDK, etc.
If not any other suggestions of tech that might help speed up that development would be great
So I've been given a MacBook Pro by work to do some R&D on what it would take to get a catalogue app built for an iPhone --- now I'm a PC guy so it's fun getting used to Mac and Xcode and I'm starting to work through learning objective-C and the iOS SDK.
I wondered given its price drop now whether iT2D would be suitable to pull together a quick prototype of a catalogue, for example:
- Display a range of categories (contemporary kitchen, traditional kitchens, appliances, etc)
- Show kitchen ranges within category
- For a range display some background images (maybe animated) with a little blurb about the items
Wondering given my knowledge of Torque (albeit the 3D versions of the engines and not 2D) whether it would be a quicker route to prototype something than working through objective-C, interface builder, iOS SDK, etc.
If not any other suggestions of tech that might help speed up that development would be great
#2
Might just grab iT2D anyway as it seems like a steal at the moment and you never know when I might find a use for it (especially if they let me keep the macbook)
02/01/2011 (9:06 am)
Thanks for the feedback, it was worth a thought if it was going to save me a little time. Might just grab iT2D anyway as it seems like a steal at the moment and you never know when I might find a use for it (especially if they let me keep the macbook)
#3
Not cause TGB is bad, but because this is exactly one of those things where you want to use CoreData for any price as there is no more performant way to achieve chiming through masses of data etc with automagic preloading and unloading in the background, including images etc. and nothing even remotely as easy and automatic to use
Replicating that even at acceptable speeds takes days to weeks.
Animations might seem easier here but CoreAnimation actually is pretty simple to use too once you get the hang of it (you basically set start and end state and then kick it off, for many peoples actually even easier to understand than the animations here). Also there is another very important reason why I would favor it in this case due to experience I had in a similar situation with Unity: iT2D apps and any other application you develop is affected by the latency of your rendering, so if rendering is causing FPS instability or even low FPS the whole input handling is affected by it, it becomes non-fluent or even non-responsive, which is between not favorable and a reason for apple to reject it right from the start.
With CoreAnimation and UIKit you will never be able to get there basically as the whole animation is executed on a far lower level and with higher "priority" than your application at all, due to that the animation will always be smooth unless the whole device stutters around in generally (heavy memory alloc / dealloc or the requirement to drop an application out of memory to make space for yours or your app running at the memory border, at worst leaking memory, cuasing a slow down of the whole OS operation before you get killed)
02/01/2011 (4:26 pm)
I would actually go with native UI Kit here.Not cause TGB is bad, but because this is exactly one of those things where you want to use CoreData for any price as there is no more performant way to achieve chiming through masses of data etc with automagic preloading and unloading in the background, including images etc. and nothing even remotely as easy and automatic to use
Replicating that even at acceptable speeds takes days to weeks.
Animations might seem easier here but CoreAnimation actually is pretty simple to use too once you get the hang of it (you basically set start and end state and then kick it off, for many peoples actually even easier to understand than the animations here). Also there is another very important reason why I would favor it in this case due to experience I had in a similar situation with Unity: iT2D apps and any other application you develop is affected by the latency of your rendering, so if rendering is causing FPS instability or even low FPS the whole input handling is affected by it, it becomes non-fluent or even non-responsive, which is between not favorable and a reason for apple to reject it right from the start.
With CoreAnimation and UIKit you will never be able to get there basically as the whole animation is executed on a far lower level and with higher "priority" than your application at all, due to that the animation will always be smooth unless the whole device stutters around in generally (heavy memory alloc / dealloc or the requirement to drop an application out of memory to make space for yours or your app running at the memory border, at worst leaking memory, cuasing a slow down of the whole OS operation before you get killed)
#4
02/02/2011 (3:22 am)
Hmmm thanks Marc that's some good insight, guess I'll just continue with my learning of the iOS SDK and follow that path. 
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