Introduction - Learn SpriteBuilder for iOS Game Development - page 9

fectNode that enables developers to create stunning visual shader effects without having to
write actual shader code. Customizing and debugging Cocos2D apps is generally easier
than doing the same with Sprite Kit because you can step into, analyze and, if need be,
modify the underlying engine source code.
About Apportable
You may be wondering: who is Apportable and what exactly are they doing?
Their mission statement is simple: to enable developers to write apps in Objective-C and
port them to Android through cross-compilation with native performance. You can learn
more about Apportable on its website: http://www.apportable.com .
In the ideal case, no code changes are necessary to port an existing iOS app written in
Objective-C to Android with Apportable. In reality, you may need to do a little more if
you haven't been testing your project on Android from the start. Specifically, because
there's so many different Android devices with wildly varying features and specifications.
If you look at Apportable's impressive list of customers, you'll notice they are all game
developers. Apportable paid respect to that, having hired many developers who now work
on Cocos2D and SpriteBuilder. All of these technologies are free and open source, and
they will remain free and open source. Only if you want to use Apportable to port to
Android and you need more than the basic features, you may need to dole out some cash.
The terms of service and prices have not been determined at the time of this writing.
The value in having an option like Apportable is to be able to focus on the platform, tools,
and technologies you are familiar with, while still being able to make the app work on
Android devices when the time comes. And you can do so without having to rewrite large
parts of your codebase and without having to compromise by either using more archaic or
less performant programming languages.
About Program Versions
Matching and advances in technology are issues we need to discuss before you set out to
read the rest of this topic.
This topic was written for and tested with Xcode 6, iOS 8 as well as SpriteBuilder v1.3
and Cocos2d-Swift v3.3. As I'm writing these lines, it's October 9, 2014. But by the time