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Links for 2011-9-16 through 2011-12-1

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Links for 2011-9-16 through 2011-12-1:

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Links for 2011-7-14 through 2011-7-31

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Links for 2011-7-14 through 2011-7-31:

  • Cocos2D Tutorial – Dynamically Coloring Sprites [Brandon Trebitowski, brandontreb.com] Have you ever seen a game (such as Tiny Tower) that contains similar sprites that only vary by certain attributes (coloring, shading, accessories, etc…)? I would often wonder how long it would take the artists to create each permutation of these sprites. After discovering that you can call a method on a CCSprite called setColor, I realized how most of this customization is done in code.
  • Muddying the Budget Waters With Social Security Many people misunderstand how the program operates. Payroll taxes stream into the trust fund that is used to pay current retirees’ benefits. When there is a surplus, that money is invested in a special type of Treasury bond that pays interest to the trust fund. At the end of last year, the trust fund had about $2.6 trillion. And though last year was the first year since 1983 that the fund paid out more than it received in tax revenue, it still continued to grow because of the interest accrued — and it is estimated to continue to grow through 2022.

    Since the money in the trust fund is held in Treasury securities, taxes collected are essentially being lent to the federal government to pay for whatever it wants (and this allows the government to borrow less from the public).

  • The Cult of Centricism We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

    So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

    The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president.

  • Revamp of a game [Yuchen Wang, ClingMarks]
  • Cocos2D and ARC [Jerrod Putman, Tiny Tim Games]
  • How To Use Custom Classes With Core Data Without Fear [Doug Sjoquist , Sunetos]
  • User Testing in the Wild: Joe’s First Computer Encounter « Boriss’ Blog
  • Make a backup copy of the MacBook Air USB Software Reinstall Drive | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog Since it doesn't come with an optical drive, giving MacBook Air buyers a DVD of the operating system wouldn't be very helpful. That's why Apple's lightest laptop comes with the USB Software Reinstall Drive — a very small white USB drive. Sometimes USB flash drives are referred to as "Thumb Drives," but this one is more like the size of a baby's finger.

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Links for 2011-6-6 through 2011-7-13

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Links for 2011-6-6 through 2011-7-13:

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Links for 2011-5-10 through 2011-5-14

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Links for 2011-5-10 through 2011-5-14:

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Links for May 6th through May 9th

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Links for May 6th through May 9th:

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Links for 2011-04-29 through 2011-05-02

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Links for 2011-04-29 through 2011-05-02:

  • How awesome is your iPhone app, really? [Greg Dunn, Unseen Things] – A lot of things seem like a good idea at the time, and the program *always* works right especially if the person using it is the one who programmed it, right? Of course not…getting fresh eyes on a project is more than a good idea; it’s essential.
  • OpenGL Render to Texture – Render to texture is a very handy functionality. Imagine your game allows for some character customization. You have the body, some different hats, different clothes and other small stuff. Now the easiest way to render this is to just draw it piece by piece every frame. With the proper Z coordinates everything falls in place. But you now have like 4-5 draw calls for one single object. Worse, you might have different textures and swamping textures is expensive..
  • Could a Smartphone App Have Been Used to Locate Bin Laden? Unconfirmed sources report that an iPhone app called Tactical NAV may have been used during the mission to locate Bin Laden. An elite crew of American forces killed bin Laden during a daring raid on Monday, capping the world’s most intense manhunt.
  • Someone Live-Tweeted the Osama Bin Laden Raid Without Knowing It How does someone unknowingly live-tweet the biggest news story of the decade? @ReallyVirtual knows. The IT consultant was just "taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops," when he heard a helicopter, then a "huge window shaking bang," and then the helicopter going down. Reading his tweets, it's obvious he had no idea what was going on—nor how life-defining that moment would be for so many people.
  • Subtle Patterns | High quality patterns for your next web project Nice collection of background patterns perfect for tiling.

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Links for 2011-04-15 through 2011-04-21

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Links for 2011-04-15 through 2011-04-21:

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Links for 2011-03-28 through 2011-04-03

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Links for 2011-03-28 through 2011-04-03:

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Links for 2011-03-17 through 2011-03-27

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Links for 2011-03-17 through 2011-03-27:

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Links for 2011-03-04 through 2011-03-07

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Links for 2011-03-04 through 2011-03-07:

  • 4 Golden Rules of iPhone Game Design | Ezone.com App News – At the core of your game you need a simple, fun game mechanic. And I stress simple. In this A.D.D. world if you don’t grab players in the first 10 seconds, you’ve probably lost them. Unlike a console game they haven’t invested $50 (in all likelihood it’s $0.99 or nothing), so they have not made a big commitment to your game. If they don’t get it in the first 10 seconds, then they are going to hit the home button and launch something else.
  • Onramps | eliolhan – Luckily* I have techniques to get back on track when I feel blocked or unmotivated. Without adding any new code, I’ll clean things up:

    Conform code indentation to my house style
    Fix whitespace and tabs
    Remove stray blank lines
    Delete superfluous comments
    Remove commented-out NSLog() statements
    Group and label related methods

  • Fatal Distractions | eliolhan – I want to talk about what I’ve learned in the last few months about Distractions and how to fight them.
  • The 3 Ingredients of Successful iPhone Apps | Tapity – To me, say I put in 300 hours to make an app; I’ll call it a success if I make over $23,000 in the first year.
  • He Thinks Many People Will Like To Read It –

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