Now that the NDA on the iPhone OS 3.0 SDK has been lifted (which happened much faster than what I thought it would take!) here’s my first contribution to the world of iPhone OS 3.0 open source code: sample code about how to use OpenGL ES 2.0 on the iPhone 3GS, something I announced in Twitter last week.
As you might know by now, one of the biggest enhancements (and yet, one of the most obscure) of the newly released iPhone 3GS is the new GPU chipset, which allows developers to create applications using Open GL ES 2.0 (together with Open GL 1.1, which was already available in the first two iterations of the iPhone). This is a major advance, invisible to the end user, which, coupled with the unprecedented performance boost of the iPhone 3GS, opens up the possibility to developers to create applications with new textures and effects, yet unforeseen on this platform.
Given that Xcode does not (yet) bring an Xcode template to play with, and that the OpenGL ES 2.0 Programming Guide book, by Aaftab Munshi, Dan Ginsburg and Dave Shreiner does not (obviously) bring iPhone examples, I have created a project in Github where I will be publishing the code samples in the book, as I progress in the lecture, ordered by chapter, ready to compile and play with.
Enjoy! I’m happy not having to use the word "[REDACTED]" any more now (there’s the other OS, the bigger cat, but, oh well…)
Update, 2009-06-24: I just found this blog post by the folks of Black Pixel (Daniel Pasco’s company) with benchmarks about OpenGL ES on the iPhone 3GS… and the first line says it all:
Holy crap, this thing is fast
Update, 2009-06-24: Jeff LaMarche just announced that the authors of the book have published iPhone - compatible code in the book website! That effectively renders this project useless :))