Cupple, which we developed for the agency Darling Dash allows two people to privately share photos, location and messages with their better half and importantly, we don’t steal a users phone book at any point!

Go check out the App available from the App Store, it’s free!

So we set about creating some content and the result is an interactive version of our portfolio, that includes images, 3D models, Google Maps, Twitter feeds and a whole host of other cool functionality, that makes our work look pretty good!

Here’s some of the things that we found when using the tool that might be helpful for others.

• If you want to lock the book to landscape, which is useful if you have lots of images and interactive content and not much text, then there’s the option in the document inspector.
• It’s possible to add alpha to images, but the button is hidden from default view so you’ll need to ‘customize’ the toolbar first.
• You can’t add hyperlinks to images, only to text. Although you can link from text to another image in the book, but only if you’ve added a title to the image.
• HTML elements are easy to add (such as Google Maps) just grab the embed code, save to a .wdgt folder along with a .plist and a Default.png screenshot. However they only become active once made full screen in the book, until then they only show the static image that you include.
• 3D models exported from 3DSMax only show textures is the .DAE file is placed in the images folder created on export.
• Interactive 3D models can be locked to only interact horizontally or vertically, but the ‘auto-rotate object when idle’ doesn’t comply to this setting and rotates on its own axis.
• Uploading to the iBook Store is easy using the iTunes Producer tool, but there is no indication of approval time…
• To edit an existing book you need to export your book from iBooks, then re-open the itmsp file that has been published using iTunes Producer and point exported version rather than re-publishing the book, which will create another submission.
• You will need to sign up to a new iTunes account to publish books, even if you are already a registered developer.

If you’re thinking about making a portfolio, catalog, design guide, game manual/guide, recipe book, interactive scrapbook, photo book, city guide, newsletter, personal study guide, wedding book, comic book then let us know if we can help!

Considering the fresh and talented competition in the mobile gaming market, the UK-based Fluid Pixel team, with a strong background in console game development, set forth to create a game that matched the capabilities of Nokia’s mobile phone technology, appealed to a wide audience and that didn’t rely on language, reactions, skill or knowledge.

For the full article and other great Developer insights take a look at www.developer.nokia.com or follow the Nokia team on Twitter.

We’ve seen consistent growth from the store and the downloads cover a range of titles, including the Number 1 Overall title Revolve, through to Animentals, the virtual pet sensation and not forgetting the Official Italian Football Games for the Azzurri.

Part of our success has been targeting the whole range of Nokia devices, from legacy S40 devices to the latest and greatest smart phones. We’ve been able to do this by using Flash to create the content, which can be designed to suit every device that Nokia releases thanks to their inbuilt support of Flash as a platform.

“Paul Callaghan, deputy chief executive of DigitalCity Business, said he was delighted to see a North East company leading the way in app development and making such a significant contribution to the digital economy.”

The Bubble Scope is due out in November, initially for iPhone, but an Android version will follow shortly after.

Read the full article or follow @bubblepix to keep up with the news.

The solution for us was to get an Enterprise Developers account as this allows us to do an enterprise distribution build that lets us avoid having to register any UDID’s also we can distribute the WIP build to clients wirelessly through our own Development website, all through the browser on their iOS device.  There’s already a great guide to setting this up posted over at Jeffrey Sambells website, however we also do flash development and have been looking at getting a few Flash projects moved across to iOS by making use of the Adobe Air 2.6 SDK, there are enough guides out there for getting this set up to build an app for testing and for App Store submission, but we needed to do a testing build for some clients. So we had to find a way to get this done, in the end it turns out to be a relatively painless operation.

We made a distribution build of our app using the Air 2.6 SDK with our enterprise distribution certificate, making sure that the bundle ID was the same as the one used in our distribution provisioning profile.

Now the ‘hacky’ part seeing as the Air SDK wont let us build for archive, but will let us do distribution and ad-hoc, we built for distribution, as that’s what we intend to package this up as.  Now ensure that you already have an Archive build for any other app already in XCode (we’re using XCode 4, but I imagine this will work just as well in earlier versions) by having a look through the organiser, if you don’t then open up one of your XCode projects and ‘Archive’ it.

If you bring up the organiser you can ‘Show in Finder’ on this Archive (Right/Command click the Archive) or have a look in “User”/Library/Developer/Xcode/Archive/”AnyDate”. You want to locate the “.xarchive” file for one of your archived apps.

Duplicate this, then rename the duplicate Archive to suit the name of the project you’re wanting to distribute. In our case “Revolve”, but keep the date and time part of the file name. Now on the xarchive file “show package contents”.

You’ll be presented with two folders ‘dSYMs’ and Products and an Info.plist file.  We’re going to need to edit the plist, so fire up the property list editor. You’ll want to change Name to the name of the app, or whatever the .app file is called that the Air SDK generated, as well as the SchemaName to the same thing.

Expand the ApplicationProperties Dictionary, and look at the ApplicationPath property, you’re going to edit this one to be “Applications/<name>.app” where <name> is the name of the .app file that the Air SDK generated.

Also the bundle identifier may need to be edited to math the bundleID that the App was built with, and check that your icon names match up (they shouldn’t need changing if you follow Apple’s standard naming conventions). Now Save this pList.

Navigate through the “Products” directory you’ll get to the Applications folder, remove anything that’s already in this folder, and replace it with the .app that the Air SDK generated ( this should then make what was entered in the Applications Path valid, ie copy revolve.app into ‘Products/Applications’ so that  ”Applications/revolve.app” is now the correct applications path.

We can safely ignore the ‘dSYMs’ folder for this.

Right now back into XCode if we now bring up the Organiser and look at the Archives tab we should see the Archive in there for our recently stitched up app, in our case we now have an Archive for Revolve. Now we can share this using the same technique as described on Jeffery Sambells website, and we now have an Enterprise Distribution of our Flash App that runs on iOS devices.