TOKYO (MacHouse) – Although we’ve been committed to developing iOS games these days, we are self-sufficient. So we develop an OS X application whenever necessary to make things easier. We are now interested in protecting application assets. If you want to harvest application resources from somebody’s product, all you have to do is open a package (Right-click and choose ‘Show Package Contents’) and navigate to the Resources folder, right? But some game developers are careful enough not to let casual users from harvesting application assets. For instance, download a hidden object game from Mac App Store and open its application package. Most likely, you won’t find application assets like PNG files and audio clips in the resource folders. How do they do it?

One way of keeping application assets away from casual users is to combine resource files into a single data file. Lockade is designed just for this purpose. That’s what we submitted to Mac App Store a few hours ago. Lockade lets you combine application assets (audio or image clips) into a single data file, which you can add to your Xcode project. I’ll take just several lines of code to recover individual assets. And it will be very difficult for casual users to harvest application assets from this data file.   Continue reading →