Introduction - Learn SpriteBuilder for iOS Game Development - page 5

The Experienced Cocos2D Game Developer
Finally, I can imagine you may be an experienced Cocos2D developer. Perhaps you
haven't been using the latest Cocos2D version, or perhaps you just want to learn whether
you should really give up some coding and do some designs in SpriteBuilder instead, and
how that might work out.
You'll find the programming aspects a walk in the park, and you'll enjoy the workflow
benefits of using SpriteBuilder that I'll present to you throughout the topic. You may even
be astonished about how much fun it is not to write program code, and you'll appreciate
being able to free your mind from tedious, repetitive programming tasks while being able
to do more of the cool programming tricks you haven't had time to explore yet.
Requirements
In order to learn from this topic, you obviously need to download SpriteBuilder for free
from the Mac App Store. To run SpriteBuilder, you need a Mac running OS X 10.8 Moun-
tain Lion or newer.
Cocos2D comes bundled with SpriteBuilder—you do not have to download it separately.
There's still a benefit in doing so, however. If you get the installer version from
http://www.cocos2d-swift.org/download and install it, you will have the
Cocos2D API reference documentation available in Xcode. But you can also access it on-
line: http://www.cocos2d-swift.org/docs/api .
Note SpriteBuilder can automatically update the Cocos2D version used by
your SpriteBuilder projects. If there's a new version available, you will be
asked to update, and if you allow it, SpriteBuilder will create a backup copy of
Cocos2D before installing the new version to that project specifically. However,
this will not update your downloaded copy of Cocos2D nor the Cocos2D Xcode
documentation files. If you want to keep the Cocos2D Xcode documentation up
to date, you will have to manually download and install each new Cocos2D ver-
sion.
Speaking of Xcode: in order to develop apps for iOS, you need to install Xcode, which is
also available for free from the Mac App Store or Apple's Developer Center: ht-
tps://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios .