Currently Google is transitioning Google Apps accounts to a new infrastructure. If your account was transitioned by you or by Google and you are experiencing problems with mobile syncing now then

1. go to the dashboard as an administrator (if you only have a user account ask your admin to do so),
2. click on “Organization & users”,
3. go to the services tab and
4. make sure that “Google Sync” is activated.
5. Go to Settings > Mobile and check if “Enable Google Sync” is enabled (which it should be if you have used Google Sync already)

Ever needed to take screenshots for iTunes Connect without having an iPad or iPhone at hand? There is a actually a way of taking perfect screenshots directly from the iOS Simulator (part of Xcode) – no workaround or editing needed. In my eyes it is even easier than taking screenshots from an iDevice.

Here is how you do it:

• Start your app in the iOS Simulator. For high resolution iPhone graphics make sure Hardware>Device>iPhone (Retina) is activated
• Press ctrl + cmd + c to copy the current simulator screen content into the clipboard
• Open Preview (e.g. through your applications folder or by doing a Spotlight search)
• In Preview press cmd + n to create a new image from clipboard
• Press cmd + l or cmd + r to rotate your screenshot as needed
• Press cmd + s to save to where you want to store your screenshot

When you develop iOS apps with an OpenGL framework such as Cocos2D you will quickly find out that memory is a scarce resource on mobile devices. One useful way to save memory is to use so called sprite sheets that bundle images into a single file and provide textures directly.

A complete tool that makes it easy to create and manage sprite sheets is TexturePacker. Its basic features are free and the pro version costs 19.95$.

I used TexturePacker for my app Snakestein’s Reading Game. You can check out the result in the free or full version on the App Store.

There are great posts by Ray Wenderlich and Chris Fletcher on how to use TexturePacker.