I am an iOS programming newbie (reading several books on the subject simultaneously) and I would like to develop a (yet another) word game.
Coming from Flash/Flex programming background I was first expecting the tiles to be best bundled as gif or png assets.
But then I have taken a look (by using iFunbox) at the popular word games (Lexulous, Wordament, Words with Friends, Ruzzle, ...) and none of them is doing that:
That is none of the many apps I've looked at includes any letter pieces as images.
So my question is what would be the recommended approach (in Xcode 5 and with no additional SDKs like Cocos2d or Sparrow) to create a letter tile for a word game?
On a tile I'd like to have
- the center-aligned letter (obviously!),
- then an index in a corner displaying the letter value
- and then another index for a total word value
When touched I'd like to make the tile a bit larger and add a shadow underneath it.
Should my tile class be a UIView
(can they be dragged around, grow and have shadows?)
Should I use a .nib file for the tile?
For dragging I have found a good suggestions already: Dragging an UIView inside UIScrollView
But what I really would like to know here is: if UIView
would make a good tile (performance- and feature-wise) or should I go for another base class (like maybe some shapes)?