If you enjoyed the look of that, head on over to the App Store to try it out!

Created by London-based independent game developers, Wicked Little Games, Social Break is already making headlines with the tech savvy, TheNextWeb reporting that the game “doesn’t stop being fun” and commenting that “this is the perfect app to play during any of your idle time”.

The magic of Social Break is the star-decorated Twitter blocks which, when hit, cause a recent tweet from your timeline to appear. The gameplay is reminiscent of the arcade classic, Breakout, and will keep you on your toes with a wide variety of positive and negative powerups – including double points, bigger paddle and reverse controls. There are also options to tweak the number of tweets shown and for how long, to suit your social reading habits.

iOS5-powered Game Center & Twitter integration means it is easy to compete with your friends or followers around the world.

Social Break is a brand new way of interacting with your Twitter timeline and is undoubtably the most fun. Now you will no longer have to make the tough coffee-break choice: play a game or be social?

Social Break is now available on the App Store. Social Break Lite is FREE on the App Store right now.

Wicked Little Games are on Twitter and Facebook. Follow us for all the latest news and updates.

Parse.com

Parse allows a developer to “add a backend to your mobile app within minutes”. Instead of having to build your own API service, host & balance it, Parse.com allows you to structure your mobile backend using their service.

The implementation is fantastic, the tutorials guide you through your first use of Parse and before long your mind starts racing with the potential of being able to host simple bits of data, without all the hassle.

Best of all, they offer a free service which should be enough to get you started, at least.

Playtomic – Game Analytics

As the name implies, this is a game-centric tip which also works for a multitude of platforms (including HTML5 and Flash), but this is still a great addition to any lists based around making a developers life easier when developing iOS apps.

The premise is simple: you can create custom logging events using the Playtomic library and then login to your account via the website and see your results. Heatmaps, in-game statistics, play length can all be collected and sifted through for that juicy bit of information that your app might just be needing.

As with Parse, the best part of this service is that it is free, easy and reliable, meaning theres really no reason to not add it in next time you’re trying to know Rovio from top-spot.

iOS Boilerplate

This Github hosted collection of codes is the perfect copy&paste go-to link. It is intended to provide you with a base code to begin with, with which you can expand out to make any app you can dream of. It’s not a simple collection either, there are some very detailed applications that you can take advantage of: Geo location, Pull down to refresh functionality, a built in web-browser, JSON and Dictionary helpers… basically anything you need, its there.

Obviously, because it’s on github it is an open source project so don’t forget to give as much as you take!

iRate – Rate my App reminder

An unbelievably simple piece of code to set up, which makes use of the new iOS ARC feature (see below…), iRate allows you to add a “rate this app” reminder to any iOS development project you want. It’s as simple as importing the library and adding ONE line of code. Simple and it works brilliantly.

iOS5 itself: Storyboards & Transitions

If you want to get straight into iPhone and iPad development but don’t know much Objective C*, then Storyboards are the perfect jumping off point.

Using the brilliant Interface Builder, a newbie iOS developer can drag and drop elements into place, assigning click events to trigger transitions to different views. Labels can be edited and buttons can be placed.

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of iOS development, but it is brilliant to see how much a developer with zero knowledge of Obby C can do.

Check this video out to see the power of the Storyboards.

*side note – I’m not saying that it is a good idea to make iPhone apps without knowledge of the language, I’m simply stating that it is possible…

iOS5 itself: ARC

Purists will argue against this being in the list – but in my opinion, ARC removes most of the headaches involved in developing, testing and maintaining iOS apps. ARC, very blandly, stands for “Automatic Reference Counting”, which in basic terms means that it handles all garbage collection & memory allocation for you. That’s right, no more “object = nil. [object release] etc…”, that is all done at compile time meaning you can focus on the more interesting parts of coding.

Because ARC is a relatively new feature of iOS development, there will be times when you want to use a library or snippet of code which has objects being released all over the show. Luckily, Apple have provided a way to disable ARC running for individual files. In my latest project, Social Break, I was able to use the CocosDenshion library, complete with crazy amounts of memory tweaking, alongside my ARC-overwatched codebase. It appears to have worked a treat.

As shown in the video, Construct 2 makes it insanely easy to make interesting and addictive games such as a platformers or puzzles. It has a large array of ready-to-use assets such as sprites, sound effects and animations. The program generates HTML5 code so is fantastically portable. One thing to note is that, unlike most other “no-code coding” programs – Construct2 does not feel as though it is dumbed down; it really feels like developers made this for developers.

The free version of the program has limited functionality but will still allow you to play around and get a feel for the possibilities of the app, whilst the full versions are limitless, allowing you to go crazy.

Impact – HTML5 Canvas & JavaScript Game Engine

Impact is, it claims, the “most awesomest way to create even more HTML 5 games” and at first glance, you’d be hard pressed to argue against that. The slick website demonstrating the engine shows a game created using the engine running on browsers both on desktops and on mobile. It also comes with its own dedicated level editor so people who are more design orientated are looked after as well.

The engine’s greatest strength is its well written and nicely presented documentation – with examples of each class in action. All this for just $99 is a steal – however there are free alternatives out there…

LimeJS HTML5 Game Framework

Available via Github, LimeJS is entirely free and open source – allowing you to build fast and (more importantly) native-experience games for multiple platforms. It has a decent community around it, however it does seem to suffer from the “too many cooks” issue and the documentation is poorly presented – offering little more than is absolutely necessary. As a free alternative, however, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything better suited for HTML5 game development.

JawsJS

More of an individual’s attempt to work with HTML5 canvas, JawsJS definitely has some legs. It has since been extended beyond the canvas and the developer promises plenty of updates in the following few months. Definitely one to watch.

GameQuery

Perhaps the one that interests me the most, GameQuery attempts to create a gaming engine based around the already fantastic jQuery framework. The developers are specifically promising that it will be easy, quick and stick to the jQuery philosophy. As an avid jQuery fan myself, this one has me excited. Supporting solid gaming features such as collision detection and animation and promising that beginners can develop basic 2D games – this could do for game development what jQuery did for carousels.

So far, so little. Google have announced that there will be an API to interact with but the extent of how much is offered is still unclear. Developers are able to sign up here to get in on the action ahead of the general public. Interestingly, there have already been a few services built for Google+ that are making some noise.

One of these ideas is GPlus.to This is essentially as tinyurl-a-like which provides you the ability to shorten your long, number-heavy Google+ name to something shorter, sweeter and all around more tweetable. Whilst pretty interesting, the service is still not able to access any of the Google+ API features and as such cannot really be classed as a Google+ app.

But what happens when Google+ opens itself up to developers? Google are one of the strongest evangelists for HTML5 and will certainly provide a fantastic collection of methods (as they have for pretty much all their big APIs – maps, translation & search) to take advantage of the new features that HTML5 and the latest browsers provide – I’d expect to see a lot of <canvas> from this point on. There is also the rumour that Google+ will be built around the OpenSocial API which means developers familiar with this should be able to just jump straight in.

Does this mean that the majority of developers will start moving away from Facebook and toward Google? Not quite. Facebook has always had a pretty bad rep for their development tools – not least the documentation. However, this has long since been recognised by Facebook and there has been some, frankly, fantastic work done under the umbrella term “Operation Developer Love“. Facebook is still not without its faults but in comparison to it a few years back, it is a pretty nice platform to build for. As a developer of several Facebook apps myself, I’m hoping that the two different platforms will see eye-to-eye in terms of integration, so its not a case of build 2 apps for 2 platforms.

Where I feel that Google+ could blow Facebook out of the water is in its (already successful) mobile apps. The problem with the Facebook apps for the iPhone/iPad is that it is a very stripped down version of the web service. Any custom tabs or applications are just not accessible. Google+ could turn this on its head and provide developers with the opportunity to make apps for the mobile version of Google+. How Apple would react to apps within apps, I’m not so sure but I would imagine that anyone with an Android device would be just peachy.

I guess at this point, until Google announces more about its developer tools, it’s a “watch this space” kind of deal. But its a very interesting space to watch, one that could literally be worth billions.

Check it out: on github or try out the demo.

The plugin takes 3 options allowing you to customize it to suit your needs; same domain links can be included as can list elements, and previously set target attributes can be overridden.

How to use

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$ ( “a” ).blankit( { option: value } );

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Options

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// Any previously set targets will be overridden with the new _blank value.
override: (default: false)

// This will include any anchor tags that are in a list (usually menu element).
listitems: (default: false)

// This will include/exclude the internal links from having blank set as a target property.
samedomain: (default: false)
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Check it out & tell me your thoughts. Don’t forget you can also fork it and use it however you want. There is also more information on the plugin at plugins.jquery.com

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“WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog” – WordPress.org
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WordPress has relatively recently begun angling itself towards the CMS market with varied success. The recent addition of custom post types in WordPress 3.0 allows developers to leave behind the idea of posts, pages & media. Additionally, WordPress has one of the most active developer communities; creating nearly 11,000 plugins for the platform. How far can these features be shoehorned into a site specification?

As of late 2010, WordPress powered nearly 8.5% of all websites showing that there is possibility to extend WP past its intended use. However, when you start using WordPress as more of a CMS, you run the risk of releasing your content to the multitude of drive-by hacks, security vulnerabilities and viruses. Definitely avoid using any of the free WordPress themes as they’re almost certainly riddled.

So, what’s the answer?

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“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” – Wiki
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I have found that the “Duck Test” applies perfectly to the WordPress scenario. If it looks like a blogging platform, it probably is best used as a blogging platform. It feels that the legacy code may be holding it back from being a full CMS platform. Perhaps they just want to straddle the line to take advantage of both scenarios.

In the end, WordPress still works very successfully as a CMS. It is perfectly suited for small to medium scale websites and the plugin directory is an invaluable tool for rolling out a website in minimal time. I would, however, suggest that if you’re finding yourself Googling for plugins, hacks and cracks to get WordPress to match a feature in your spec, you should probably take a look at the other, more CMS focused, platforms out there – Expression Engine is a personal favourite and a natural evolution of the WordPress idea of simple-to-roll-out websites.

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The first thing you’ll need to do is install the amazing Allow EE Code plugin. This plugin does 90% of the work required and allows you to put Expression Engine tags within a Channel Entry. To make this work, activate the plugin and go to the location in your template where the entry will be output. Wrap whatever you want to be allowed to write EE tags in the following:

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{exp:allow_eecode}
{body}
{/exp:allow_eecode}
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This will allow you to then place, and successfully output, Expression Engine tags within your entry. The problem is, if you want to be able to render your global variables in the entry it will not work.

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This in an entry will work:
{exp:channel:entries}{title}{/exp:channel:entries}

This in an entry won’t work:
{global_var}
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To be able to pass through global variables, we need to tell the plugin to string replace the global vars with their correct contents. To do this, open up the EEAllow plugin file:

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/system/expressionengine/third_party/allow_eecode/pi.allow_eecode.php
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and just before the function “Allow_eecode” ends, put the following:

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// Checks to see if there are any global variables set.
if(count($GLOBALS['assign_to_config']['global_vars']) > 0)
{

// Loops through each global variable
foreach($GLOBALS['assign_to_config']['global_vars'] as $gkey => $gvar)
{

// Creates a variable with the name of the
// global variable wrapped in curly brackets}
$gtag = “{” . $gkey . “}”;

// String replaces any found global variable
// tags in the content with the value of the global variable
$str = str_replace($gtag,$gvar,$str);

}
}

// Put the above code before this
$this->return_data = $str;
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Voilá! This will now correctly output the global variable wherever you want your content to be shown.

Thanks to @spol for helping me figure this one out, saving me endless hours of banging my head on the desk.

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Spotify, a digital music service based in Europe, already has a dedicated iPhone app which allows premium users to play tracks on the go and interestingly, offline. This has long since been my “killer” app on the iPhone – making the daily commute more bearable.

Unfortunately, Spotify have not yet released an iPad native app and users have had to depend on the oversized iPhone version if they wanted Spotify on the tablet. Well not for much longer if the following tweet exchange is to be believed.

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The possiblities for the iPad version of the app are immense – and hopefully the Spotify library of free tracks will have the ability to integrate fully with your home cinema systems and further. Lets just hope Spotify’s dedicated existing customers won’t have to upgrade their accounts to Premium Pro Plus XL to be able to use the app.

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