TOKYO (MacHouse) – Although we’ve been committed to developing iOS games these days, we are self-sufficient. So we develop an OS X application whenever necessary to make things easier. We are now interested in protecting application assets. If you want to harvest application resources from somebody’s product, all you have to do is open a package (Right-click and choose ‘Show Package Contents’) and navigate to the Resources folder, right? But some game developers are careful enough not to let casual users from harvesting application assets. For instance, download a hidden object game from Mac App Store and open its application package. Most likely, you won’t find application assets like PNG files and audio clips in the resource folders. How do they do it?

One way of keeping application assets away from casual users is to combine resource files into a single data file. Lockade is designed just for this purpose. That’s what we submitted to Mac App Store a few hours ago. Lockade lets you combine application assets (audio or image clips) into a single data file, which you can add to your Xcode project. I’ll take just several lines of code to recover individual assets. And it will be very difficult for casual users to harvest application assets from this data file.   Continue reading →

TOKYO (MacHouse) – Almost three weeks have passed since we introduced our last software title. What have we been up to lately? Well, we are going back to iOS. Wait… Before we do, let us release one more desktop application. The one that we submitted to Mac App Store several hours ago is called Pazico.

Available at Mac App Store

When you develop a 2D game, it’s likely that it will involve one or more sprite images. One way of shaping a complex game character is to construct a polygon connecting vertices with NSBezierPath (or UIBezierPath for iOS), which is not a simple task. That’s where you will find Pazico useful. When you select and open a sprite image, Pazico will generate a black-and-white imagine over which it will create as many clickable squares as the number of available pixels. By clicking on these squares, you can tell Pazico where you want to set points for constructing a polygon that resembles the non-transparent area of the sprite image. The user has options of generating bezier path code for Mac OS X or iOS. And they can also select one of nine anchor point positions. Furthermore, the beauty of using Pazico is that the order by which you select vertices is not important. So the application will automatically rearrange vertices you select so that your Objective-C code can be generated and you can reconstruct the sprite polygon within your SKScene object.   Continue reading →

TOKYO (MacHouse) – We’ve run out of development ideas as far as the OS X platform is concerned. So we are likely to switch to iOS soon. Wait… We actually submitted a new software title to Mac App Store just about half an ago. This new software submission is called GoRandom.

GoRandom is a status menu application that lets you generate random passwords consisting of alphabetic letters, numbers and special characters. All you have to do is choose Make Password from its status menu. And you’ll get a random pasword in your clipboard.   Continue reading →

TOKYO (MacHouse) – We’ve been quite productive this month as we have released four software title so far. All of them are now available at Apple‘s Mac App Store. We also submitted our 5th software title of the month to Mac App Store several hours ago. This new software submission is called Look4Faces.

Imagine examining a security video to find suspicious individuals. Spotting human faces on a long video clip can be a tedius task. Look4Faces is a desktop application that lets you scan a QuickTime-readable video clip (M4V, MOV, MP4) to find frames containing faces. As a result, Look4Faces will list all frames with one or more faces. Select one frame shot under the Pictures window, which you can save as an image file. Or select several or even all hundreds or thousands of frame shots with faces and let the application export to a folder you specify.

Look4Faces comes with a built-in video player. And you can click on a particular screenshot with faces to locate the exact frame over the video player. Furthermore, you can take a screenshot at any play head position by just clicking on a button.   Continue reading →

TOKYO (MacHouse) – I don’t know why, but we’ve been quite productive this month. In fact, we submitted a new desktop application to Mac App Store about half an hour ago. This new software release is called simplyCircled.

simplyCircled is a desktop application that lets you create images of circled letters easily. You’ll get to select the font of a letter that appears inside a colored circle. You can of course fill the inner area of the circle with a color of your choice.

simplyCircled is especially good at consecutively creating images of circled numbers as opposed to letters. You can let the application automatically create images of circled numbers consecutively up to 999. You decide on start and end numbers.   Continue reading →