There was a recent comment about saving / restoring application state when using openFrameworks for iPhone which got me to thinking about how to do it. Apple’s frameworks provide a fairly thorough way to save state to the disk and restore later. There seem to be three primary ways to do this: simple plist files (usually encoded in binary on the iPhone), archived data (they like to refer to this as freeze-dried object graphs) and core data.

I believe that archiving objects require methods inherited from NSObject, which we don’t have in openFrameworks’ ofSimpleApp. Core Data seems like overkill, so I looked into using plist files.

There are likely better ways to do this, but this ad-hoc solution works wonderfully for a small app I’m working on, and only requires a bit of Objective-C code that could likely be moved up into a nice wrapper class. However, since the question was asked I’d just like to get it out there before working on a more elegant approach. (more…)

Had a really nice time tonight at the oF knitting circle held at Parsons in NYC. Saw several really inspiring projects and spoke to several people about using openFrameworks for iPhone development and showed the current version of the particle game using ofxiPhoneAlertView.

Quite a few folks mentioned that they have become interested in openFrameworks after hearing about it’s use for creating iPhone applications. While not every app is suitable, I saw a few really nice examples. My only regret is not getting the name of the fellow who was working with creating a sound wrapper.

The wiki page for the knitting circle is at the openFrameworks wiki.