Hourglass for iPhone - ios

I'm trying to exploring iOS application right now. I got a simple idea, which is to create an hourglass application. I did found some apps on the App Store, but the animation is not quite satisfying. Lets say, if I want to create a smooth animation of the sand falling down, the gravity, is there any advice on where should I start? I am thinking to use OpenGL ES for the animation. not sure if this is a good idea, since I do not know how to keep the sand in the hourglass, and each grain falls perfectly fine. is there any algorithm that I should look into?

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ARKit little jumps during track

I've been using ARkit and I'm loving it, but I noticed that during load tracking can gut a little jumpy (suddenly objects jump from their position a little bit off, like 1-3 cms). I've been wondering if there's a way to smooth out these jumps so it wouldn't be so distracting. Here is a short video demonstrating it.
https://youtu.be/wmMBjlLyK7w
I have been using ARKit and am also loving it I have been experiencing these issues as well and I have my theories but I am positive it is an issue with the hardware (comment which device you are using and I might be able to give a better estimate)
I believe it is the cameras on our devices and if that is the case then I would not worry about it too much because that would mean a behind the scenes problem we cant change or alter
If I'm not mistaken I remember Apple saying something about this in one of their developer classes earlier in this months keynote as I said before I wouldn't worry about it because older devices will have a harder time with the tracking because of the poorer cameras

SpriteKit: Should I pan the camera or move the background?

When building a game with SpriteKit, with a platformer game (like Doodle Jump for example), is it preferable to move the camera up, or the background nodes down ?
What is the standard practice in other frameworks ?
MOVE THE CAMERA!!!
One of the weirdest things about 2D game engines is that it often takes them a series of versions to get a camera.
They should be born with them.
SpriteKit was no different, it took forever to get a camera.
Now that it has one, never ever think of not using it.
Will make your life a million times simpler.
I can think of no exceptions, but look forward to being proven wrong.
move background was HOTFIX until proper cam support added.
use the cam. its easy and fun. no reason to not imo.

Implementing Perfectly Timed Animations

Creating Perfectly "up to spec" Animations
I'm working with a designer right now that likes to work a lot with After Effects. They create beautiful, well timed animations that look great, but I'm having trouble actually implementing the designs.
I can make everything look perfect, as in everything is the right size, shape, color, etc., but I can't get the movements to feel perfect, like they are in the spec. I can try my best to eyeball it, and tweak my animation parameters until things look close enough to the original design, but this isn't very satisfying. All of that tweaking and recompiling is super time consuming, and not very fun, and in the end things don't always feel correct as I can only approximate the timing functions.
Are there any tools that make implementing After Effects animations in iOS easier?
I would suggest that you take a look at my animation library for iOS. iOS Animation Examples With this native library you can import Quicktime video data using the Animation codec and convert that data with exact timing already defined by the animators. This ability to export directly from After Effects can really save you a lot of time.

How to add continuous movement to iPad app

I'm writing a 3d car designer ipad app and I want to add a little "life" to it. I want it to be similar to what "3D Car Builder" iPad app does, in that from the moment the app starts, there's just the slightest amount of "movement" in the scene. Even if the iPad is sitting on the table, there's movement going on.
I'm testing on a 1st gen iPad, so whatever they've implemented, works on my device. I have (iOS 5 installed). I've looked up several things, thinking this was developed with the accelerometer, or possibly magnetometer, core motion of some sort...I can't figure out where to start. It might something as simple as moving the 3D scene in the x direction for a small amount, then y-direction, the negative x, then negative y. I dunno, it's something simple.
Anyone know how I/they might have implemented this?
Okay, nevermind...I figured this one out. Worked great using CCActionInterval

Image partly off screen killing as3 frame rate on IOS

I'm developing a game in as3 for iPhone, and I've gotten it running reasonably well (consistanty 24fps on iPhone 3G), but I've noticed that when the "character" goes partly off the screen, the frame rate drops to 10-12fps. Does anyone know why this is and what I can do to remedy it?
Update - Been through the code pretty thoroughly, even made a new project just to test animations. Started a image offscreen and moved it across the screen and back off. Any time the image is offscreen, even partially, the frame rates are terrible. Once the image is fully on the screen, things pick back up to a solid 24fps. I'm using cacheAsBitmap, I've tried masking the stage, I've tried placing the image in a movieclip and using scrollRect. I would keep objects from going off the screen, except that the nature of the game I'm working on has objects dropping from the top down (yes, I'm using object pooling. No, I'm not scaling anything. Striclt x,y translations). And yes, I realize that Obj-C is probably the best answer, but I'd really like to avoid that if I can. AS3 is so much nicer to write in
Try and take a look at the 'blitmasking' technique: http://www.greensock.com/blitmask
From Doyle himself:
A BlitMask is basically a rectangular Sprite that acts as a high-performance mask for a DisplayObject by caching a bitmap version of it and blitting only the pixels that should be visible at any given time, although its bitmapMode can be turned off to restore interactivity in the DisplayObject whenever you want. When scrolling very large images or text blocks, BlitMask can greatly improve performance, especially on mobile devices that have weaker processorst

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