I love open source software. I love that there are people out there with such a love of programming that they’re willing to spend countless hours of their own time to build cool things that people find extremely useful on a day to day basis. For iPhone development one of the best open source things around is Cocos2D. Here was a package originally made for Python that riq went and converted to Objective-C and now is used in all kinds of iPhone games, and by me for my current project. When you read the forums you see all kinds of cool stuff happening. The community works together to support each other’s efforts, to further develop the library and quickly fix bugs that come up.
Every now and then you even get to see financial success based around the open source project, whether it’s by supporting users of the software, or building addons to the software. In the case of Cocos2D for iPhone check out Particle Designer by 71 Squared. This thing is amazing. I’ve developed games for 10 years and every game I’ve worked on used particles in one way or another and none of them ever had a programmer with the time to build as nice of a particle design tool as this, and here’s one you can buy for $8 that works with an open source engine. That’s so awesome it blows my mind. I’ll be buying it straight away and putting it to good use.
