Author: Michael Gillies

Swipe Conference Of the many excellent sessions at this week's Swipe Conference, the one titled "Build Better Cocoa Apps Using Game Mechanics" by Paris Buttfield-Addison was unique in its topic. In it, Paris outlined how gamification is currently viewed as something that can be quickly slapped onto an existing product in order to increase its appeal, whereas in reality, successful gamification requires carefully thought-out integration, for when done correctly it should form a core part of your app's user experience.
Perhaps the most indispensable tool when developing iOS applications is the iOS simulator. However, if you want to test an app whose functionality revolves around utilizing the device's GPS, then you're out of luck - Apple's iOS simulator will only provide you with a single location (the location of Apple's headquarters). Furthermore, whilst the next version of XCode promises some progress in this area, it's still not clear if/how it'll be able to recorded data for later playback. In this entry I'm going to detail the process we followed to create a small location simulation framework that can also record data.