Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Note
Since Gaikai was acquired by Sony, their cloud gaming system has been offline.
At the time of writing, their website says this will change in the near future.
There are many Java-based game emulators online, including ones for classic con-
sole, arcade, and mobile games.
Mobile9
(
www.mobile9.com
)
has all three plat-
forms and more.
Objective-C
Objective-C is the main programming language used by Apple for the OS X and iOS
operating systems and their respective APIs: Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. Based on the
C programming language, it adds object-oriented programming via a thin layer of in-
terface similar to Smalltalk.
It was developed in the early 1980s by NeXT for its NeXTSTEP operating system. It
was selected by Apple as the main language from which OS X and iOS are derived.
Generic Objective-C programs that do not use the Cocoa or Cocoa Touch libraries
can also be compiled for any system that can run basic C and vice-versa.
Cocoa
Cocoa is Apple's native object-oriented API for the Mac OS X operating system.
Most OS X and all iOS applications are built using Cocoa. Combining Xcode and
Cocoa provides an excellent set of development tools for both operating systems.
Cocoa Touch
Cocoa Touch is a UI framework for building software programs to run on the iPhone,
iPod, and iPad from Apple Inc. It's mostly written in Objective-C and adds features to
OS X that are targeted specifically at iOS devices. Cocoa Touch provides a Model-
View-Controller software architecture, just like Cocoa. Tools for developing applica-
tions based on Cocoa Touch are included in the iOS SDK.
