Forum Contest: Tic-Tac-Toe App for iOS

Updated! Thanks :)

I've updated it. Thanks!

it still isn't accessible :/

Try this: iOS Development Track

"...Then post a link as an answer to this post. It can be a link to downloadable project file..."

Cheers. Let's do our best!

I absolutely hate the latter, but I love adding effects.

Great job!

I like that you can play against the system. Great work!

Same implementation I was going to use - user vs. computer. Great stuff!

Thank you!

MOVE.h, MOVE.m files not found :( I would love to give this a try

Stunning, Jo Albright. Nice work!

Hi Anthony, I apologize for not including that (it is a class I use in all of my projects and forgot to put it in the project folder).

• Added MOVE.h and MOVE.m to project in GitHub

Thanks Matthew! I submitted it to the App Store last night because it turned out much better than I thought it would.

I am so impressed by this. Amazing job!

Spectacular job Jo. Well done.

Thanks Anthony & Aaron!

I can't wait to see this on the App Store. It's really really good Jo!

You blew this out of the water! Amazing!

Thank you very much Amit, your words are too kind!

These concepts in your game are above and beyond any online teaching courses dude. Yikes. Great stuff. How in the hell did you implement AI into your app?

Thanks Stephen. Yea I didn't stop at learning online only, part self-taught and also have taken an iOS class as well. I don't think you are ever too advanced to participate in challenges... and I still have a lot to learn. So, I love joining competitions like this to drive me to learn non-traditional techniques and push my creativeness.

As for the AI... basically a static AI is just a bunch of conditions and randomness to make it feel intelligent. Right now the bot looks for a winning spot, then a blocking spot, then a random spot (this is key as it allows for every game to be different and keeps it interesting). I do have a plan to collect past game information and allow the bot to learn how to play better, making it harder and harder to beat... but that will probably take awhile to implement.

Absolutely stunning design. Also, I really liked you're code. Lot's of stuff to learn from!

Thank you Thomas! It is always great to hear people appreciating code. Honestly I wrote that very fast, so there is a few spots where I could have made code reusable. I will be making updates to it this week. :)

Did you go to The Iron yard for the iOS class?

I went to the Big Nerd Ranch back in 2012. I teach at The Iron Yard. I send all of my students to Treehouse both for pre-work and for continuing practice as well. I think to become awesome you need a certain amount of group and self-teaching.

I agree, I want to go to the Iron Yard, but can't leave for the amount of time needed

Do you recommend any books to read other than Big Nerd Ranch?

Wow great UI and I love the robot element

Thanks Kirk. Glad you like the robot. Was the one element that wanted to make happen in this app.

Anthony Lockett - Books I own that I have found helpful.

• Cocoa Design Patterns
• Effective Objective - C 2.0
• iOS 7 Programming Fundamentals

Although I don't learn best from books, I have enjoyed having them as a good exercise for me to pursue parts of the language I normally would not.

Also, to anyone who really feels it is hard to pursue any language, I would encourage you to find a passion project (an itch to scratch). I have found that most people build amazing things from something they wanted or felt wasn't done right by others. I personally built an app for vector illustration which pushed me to learn Core Graphics very intensely. You also tend to remember code better when you are learning it through an app you are invested in. That is why any app I build for a contest like this has to be something I would submit to the app store... or I will forget what I learned while building it.

Thank you Jo! :)

This is really cool. Well done!

Brilliant design!

very nice!

Thank you, Aaron Ackerman , but your's does look way much better :)

Cheers thank you very much!

Nice tip!

Thanks Jo, I actually got the idea after seeing your app. I searched stack Overflow for some example code and found that someone posted this as a comment to a thread. I was shocked that it was so easy lol.

I like yours better. Good job to you as well.

Cheers Jose!

Matthew thank you for the very kind words but my money is on Jo Albright.

Yup, I like to second Aaron's opinion concerning Jo's fantastic work :)

Thanks Aaron, but I agree with Matthew. There are multiple ideas here that I am now wanting to implement in my app, as I did not thing of them before.

Aaron :

• I love the movement in and out of your game with a home screen
• The exit button to leave a game is also very kind to a user
• Plus your personal logo is awesome

Enara :

• Great idea of allowing the user to choose a player type
• Good implementation of playing against the computer
• Fun play on the logo and the "T"

Tom :

• Dude that viking design is amazing... colored shields and the banners denoting whose turn it is rocks

And everyone else who has submitted have figured out how to get this game to work in different ways. It is really cool to see how different brains come to different conclusions. The two main reasons I love Treehouse 1) their content is very creative and constantly keeps me interested 2) the community they are building is very diverse and brilliant.

Good luck to everyone!

Dude. Too kind. I got really excited when the iOS 7 design was released, because that style is my jam!

Dude... cool animations and smart way of showing whose turn it is. Very cool ideas coming out of your brain. I hope you finish this out in the future.

The animation is sweet! nice job Thomas.

I agree with Jo Albright on this one, very sweet prompt for the current turn. Nice work!

Thanks, guys - I appreciate your comments! I do plan on finishing this one up; it will be my first complete app.

All of your apps are looking well too - excellent work around this forum.

I use storyboards in some projects. 2 personal projects that I am currently building rely on storyboards. But, I think they can be overkill for some projects and other projects they just feel like they are in the way.

For this project... I could have done a storyboard, but I work faster with code. I have set it up so that I can add a storyboard later when I choose to add features like color themes, p2p games, etc.

For other projects I do a lot of CoreGraphics drawing which I currently have not figured out a way to visualize in storyboards (if there even is a way).

In the end, I believe you should know how to build an app only with code (so you know what is going on behind the scenes of storyboard). Once you understand how it works, then you should choose whether an app really needs it or if you do it as a practice that makes you build apps faster.

That's some good advice. I'll need to work on creating apps with the storyboards. I've never done it that way.

I started learning iOS development using storyboards-- they are quite useful to get to learn visually how the view hierarchy works. It also spares you from writing a lot of redundant code during development with managing said view hierarchy with smaller apps. However, I find that I'm a lot more efficient with code and having everything in code in front of me helps me to diagnose problems faster. A lot of it is preference and use case.

Thanks for sharing Matthew!

The animations in your app are just as cool!

I like! :D

Very fun design! And I like the ? for stalemate.

That "?" was supposed to be the infinity symbol. Looked right in the input field. :)

Great job for a first app on your own. Keep it up!

Well done. You should add Ninja icons for O and Pirate icons for X. And Then you can call the app Pirates vs Ninjas lol.

Great job Chad!

We will release it by 5pm EST today. Just conducting some final checks before release. Meanwhile, checkout the short CocoaPods course we released over the weekend, which helps you install third party libraries.

What new iOS course?

Ohhhhh... YAY!

Already started it lol

What the robot does :

I have three formulas to choose a spot :

• Check for a winning spot : which looks through every set of three to find 2 spots owned by the robot and the third spot is free.

• Check for a blocking spot : if no winning spot, then do the same loop but looking for the users 2 owned and 1 free set.

• Random spot : if neither of the above are found, take all of the available spots and choose a random spot to select.

The random spot allows for gameplay to be different each time. And I change who starts each game to give advantage to both sides.

I also added a time delay and spinner at the top to make it look like the robot is thinking when choosing a spot... giving it a humanistic quality (and the thought of fallibility). Normally the choice would be instantaneous and feel like you are playing against an unbeatable machine.

<3! I was curious about this too. Thanks Enara.

So there are implications to using special methods that do things under the hood for you. Yes it simplifies parts of your code, but you lose speed a lot of times. In this case, that blur method in the Tic Tac Toe app (which is partly found code that I have modified and simplified it even more), so far is the fastest blur render I have tested. I use it in my app Liltool, which is a vector drawing app. I do a live render blur for the top and bottom bars and it needs to render as fast as possible as you drag things around.

So short answer, yes there are simpler ways of doing them... but I am one of the last people to use simple methods, as I enjoy as close to total control over my environment as possible. For my drawing app, everything is done with CGContext and methods like CGContextAddCurveToPoint, CGContextSetBlendMode, etc.

I guess I was assuming that Apple provides us better methods for all cases, but it depends on our needs really. Thank you for sharing your experience, this is very useful.

Hi Thomas, great question! After searching via google and a few other sites like stack overflow here is what I found.

I'm sure Jo will have a better answer for you but I hope that helps.

Strong is the same as retain in a property declaration, so for ARC projects use strong instead of retain.
Use assign for C primitive properties and weak for weak references to Objective-C objects.

//Link below to stack overflow answer:
//http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8927727/objective-c-arc-strong-vs-retain-and-weak-vs-assign

Thanks Aaron Ackerman for answering very quickly. And yes, that is basically the answer (under normal conditions).

Note : Apple documentation does write weak when describing how to create a delegate. But it does not explain why weak instead of assign, only that you should not use strong.

Like every other convention known to man, this is debated because of different view points. Most people just debate based on partial information (I am not immune to this).

Some people build delegates that will deallocate before the class that is accessing it. Since this happens they want it to be weak so that when the delegate is sent a message, the delegate will be nil instead of a dangling pointer. This seems to have happened with people running multi-threaded actions that make timing an unsure thing. I honestly don't know what use case would warrant that situation. And I would first question is what they are doing correct.

In this app, I have no items that will call a delegate after it was deallocated. So I write assign for delegates, mostly to keep myself inline when building apps. No, I am not against writing weak, this is just a convention I have learned from someone smarter than me.

Basically, you should never do something because one person says that is the way you should do it. You need to understand the situation and the consequences from your actions.

Hopefully this is helpful information.