iPhone App Scavenging

I love isometric 3D in games, so alongside the awesome EDGE I have a new love on iPhone in Eboy FixPix. I’ve been a fan of his for some years now but have found a new level of appreciation for the work when viewed in pseudo 3D by tilting the device to achieve the parallax effect and sync up the image correctly.

This is a good time to share a trick I found online, enabling one to dive into the assets of many app-store games to get an idea of how they were created. Simply copy the app file (work with a copy so as to retain the original file, which you’ll find in your My Documents…\iTunes\Mobile Applications folder) and rename it from .ipa to .zip – from here it’s possible to explore the contents and view the available movies, images and animation frames with WinZip or similar.

It should be noted that some apps are better than others, (depending on how well-organised the developer is and, as far as I can tell, the bit-depth of the .png files), but there are some gems to be discovered.