From John at Luma Code Software...

Hello, and thanks for taking an interest in the Simon Extreme source code. I've been lurking on the cocoa-dev mailing list for a long time now and thanks to all of the knowledgeable and helpful developers and Apple employees, I've picked up dozens of Cocoa programming techniques that are under- or non-documented elsewhere. The Simon Extreme source code is a chance for me to give a little bit back to the Cocoa community. Okay, it's just a simple game, but there there are some interesting concepts covered.

Concepts

Within the code you'll find implementations of many concepts for which I've found little sample code on the web. They include:

• A variety of ways to present highly customized windows
• Custom window close/minimize/zoom widgets
• NSButton subclasses that respect alpha channels of images for hit testing
• An NSTableView with custom background
• Examples of how to use NSURLHandle
• A replacement class for NSSound
• A simple NSFormatter example
• Using web-based PHP scripts to handle online SQL database storage

Bugs

There are no known bugs in this release, but bugs will certainly turn up (is there any significant software out there that doesn't have at least one bug?). If you find a bug, please send me a note. Bonus points for providing a fix.

To Do

• When it's Simon's turn to play sounds, do so in a separate thread so that the app remains responsive. However, QuickTime is highly thread unsafe, so this might be tricky. (done in version 1.1!)
• Include an option to play against a black background.

From Rich at Rich's World Industries...

Hi there! I had a great deal of fun doing the graphics for this game. You can download a couple of layered Photoshop files, which show the construction of the main and high scores windows from the game. You'll see some examples of various types of surfaces, window widgets, shadows, lighting effects, bevels, and other shiny, glassy stuff.

While this may not be rocket science for the advanced Photoshop user, some people might find the example PSD files useful or interesting.

Redistribution

Have a look at the Creative Commons Public License that's included in the download, or see:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0-legalcode

for specifics on redistribution of this project. Essentially, you can distribute the project however you like as long as you give the original authors credit and do not charge for it. If you modify the project, you must publish the modified source code before distributing the binary.

Contact

For questions about the source code, contact John Scalo.
For questions about the graphics, contact Rich Dellinger.

Enjoy!