First, books!

We're very pleased to announce that our latest two books are now available! The first, Learning Cocoa with Objective-C Fourth Edition, is an update to our previous third edition book, this time co-written with our frequent collaborator and co-conspirator Tim Nugent. It covers everything existing programmers need to skill up with the latest in iPhone, iPad, and Mac development technologies. 

The second new book is the iOS Game Development Cookbook; it provides a huge range of recipes for common things you need to when building a game for iOS (or any other platform, if you're willing to translate the examples out of Cocoa and Objective-C, or even for things that aren't games if you're creative!)

We're really proud of both of these books, and hope you find them useful and enjoyable! Let us know what you think, or if you have any questions. You can find more details, and links to sample code, on our books page.

Second, training!

If you like our books, then why not try our training? Check out our previous blog post to learn more about our upcoming Melbourne iOS developer training.

Finally, conferences!

We're very pleased to be speaking at the (very awesome) O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) again this year – for the fourth time in a row! We'll be presenting our mobile app design workshop “Unfortunately, Design Tutorial Has Stopped”, and Other Ways to Infuriate People With Mobile Apps with frequent collaborator Chris Neugebauer, as well as the session How Do I Game Design?, exploring the basics of game design. 

Additionally, Tim Nugent (our co-author on the latest Learning Cocoa book) will be presenting the session My Friends Keep Leaving and it is Ruining Board Games Day, which explores the state of augmented and remote board gaming; Chris Neugebauer is also presenting the session Portable Logic/Native UI exploring best practices for building mobile apps that need to run on multiple platforms. It's all sure to be excellent! Do try it.

Just a quick post to announce a Melbourne iOS Developer Lab will be running June 20-22. Our iOS Developer Labs are super popular, and usually fill up fast – we take 3 days of your week and bring you up to speed with iOS 7+ development!

Past participants have enjoyed their time learning how to build iPhone and iPad apps with us:

“Secret Lab’s iOS Developer Lab stoked the fire to get back into iOS development for me - I was surprised by some of the things I learned along the way. Often the tangents were some of the best stuff, but the core material was a great curriculum!”

— Past participant, Melbourne, December 2012

“I think this was the best training course I’ve ever done. Secret Lab blew me away with their approachability and willingness to explain and answer my silly questions! Highly recommended.”

— Past participant, Brisbane, February 2014

For the next few days you can sign up at the half price rate of $750 AUD + GST. Please email us if you have any questions, or if you'd like a discount for group signups (3+). We're also happy to hear from you if you're currently unemployed or a student and would like to chat about special prices. You can learn more about us, and check out our work and books on this website.

We made another nifty little extension!

UIView+BlurFade is an Objective-C category lets you take any UIView and make it blurry and greyscale. This is super useful for when you want to make a view look disabled, and looks really pretty to boot!

This category uses Core Image to perform the blurring and grey-scaling. Because you can't apply CIFilters to views on iOS, it actually cheats a little bit - instead of gradually blurring the view over time, it blurs it once, stores it in an image, and then fades that image over your original content.

To use this category, just drop the two files into your project and #import them. Then, when you want to make your view go blurry and faded out, you just do this:

To remove the blur effect, you call its counterpart:

We hope you find UIView+BlurFade useful! If you have any comments, either create an issue on GitHub, or shoot us an email!

We're really excited to announce an intensive 2-day iOS developer workshop in our hometown, Hobart. The workshop is organised in conjunction with ACS Tasmania.

You can learn all about it on our training page, or over at the ACS website. There is a discount for ACS members.

The workshop is designed for existing programmers (of any sort) who want to learn iOS development, or iOS programmers who want to get up to speed with the latest techniques for building iPhone and iPad apps. It teaches the very latest public iOS developer tools and features.

Brisbane and Melbourne iOS developer training is also currently open for registration.

Secret Lab built the Play School Play Time app for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

We're really excited that Play School Play Time for iPad, an app we built for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, is a finalist in two categories of the 20th AIMIA Awards!

Play School Play Time is a finalist in "Best of Tablet – Entertainment" and "Best of Tablet – Learning and Education". 

If you haven't checked out the app, if you're in Australia you can grab it from the App Store here, for free, or here, if you're elsewhere!

We're thrilled that Secret Lab is in such good company again this year! Previously, in the 19th AIMIA Awards, Play School Art Maker for iPad, also built by Secret Lab for the ABC was a finalists in "Effectiveness", "Best Application for a Tablet", and "Best Children's", and in the 18th AIMIA Awards, Foodi for iPad was a finalist in "Best Cultural or Lifestyle", and Play School Art Maker for iPad was a finalist in "Best Application on a Tablet or Mobile".

Recently, we were also thrilled to win a Tasmanian ICT Industry Award for 2013, for our work on innovative apps for kids! 

We'll be running our popular iOS developer in Melbourne and Brisbane again in February 2014! Early Bird registrations are now open.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us.