Introduction

Sparrow is written in pure Objective-C. You will need to have a basic knowledge of this language to use Sparrow. There are numerous books available that teach you the language, and there is a very good introduction available on Apple's iPhone developer page. If you have not used the language yet, fear not: if you know any other object oriented language, you will learn it quickly.

You don't need to know much about the iPhone API. If you plan to develop your application completely with Sparrow, you won't need to use any Cocoa classes.

For a lot of applications, though, it makes sense to intermix Sparrow and Cocoa. Personally, I create the game menu using Cocoa (thus having easy access to text input, table view controllers, etc.) and the game itself with Sparrow. All Sparrow rendering is done inside an ordinary UIView object (SPView), just like anything else in Cocoa.

Sparrow Versions

This manual is covering the 1.x branch of Sparrow. There are some substantial differences between version 1 and 2.

  • Sparrow 1.x requires iOS 3.0 and OpenGL ES 1.1. It runs on all iOS devices.
  • Sparrow 2.x requires iOS 5.0 and OpenGL ES 2.0. You need at least an iPhone 3GS to run games built with that version.

If you create a new project, I'd recommend to use the very latest version of Sparrow. By now, almost all iOS devices that are still downloading content in the App Store satisfy these requirements. Your games will be easier to write and they will run faster.

If you want to learn about Sparrow 2.0, switch over to the updated Manual. Otherwise, continue with the link below.

Next section: Installation

  manual_v1/introduction.txt · Last modified: 2013/05/24 13:58 by daniel
 
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