Parse / NGUI Upgrade

NOTE: I completed this work the week of September 30 - October 4. But I got behind on my blog posts so I just split up my previous work by weeks.

As mentioned in previous post that shortly after I finished writing code to communicate to Parse from within Unity, Parse released an official plugin for Unity. In addition, NGUI the user interface plugin we were using got a major upgrade so we decided to quickly redo our work using the new version of NGUI and the official Parse plugin. This process didn't take very long due to being able to mitigate most of the code / user interface created before very easily.

The Unity Parse plugin quickly resulted in a huge productively boost for a number of reasons. Including:

1. Support for all Parse Features = The code I wrote to communicate with Parse only supported the small subset of the features of Parse that we needed and I was adding to it as needed. The official Parse plugin gave us support for every feature of Parse right away.
   
2. Built-In JSON Support = Since Parse uses JSON for requests and responses - my own code had to have a way of communicating via JSON. The code I wrote was passable - supporting most features of JSON but the official Parse plugin handles all the JSON stuff out of sight making our code much more readable.
   
3. Documentation = Lastly, the official Parse Plugin has very good documentation.

The NGUI plugin upgrade also gave plenty of benefits:

1. Less Clipping Issues = The version of NGUI we were using had some issues with text clipping through textures and required manually adjusting Z values in order to try to find a spot where clipping would not occur.
   
2. Quicker User Interface Creation = With the clipping issues solved user interfaces could be created more quickly and with greater confidence that they would look good in the game. In addition, the upgraded NGUI plugin provided an easier way of sending events from user interface elements to our code. Before the upgrade any code that wanted to received a user interface event would have to have a public method with the name of the event. For example to receive a button click, our code would have to have a OnClick method in the code. After the upgrade, the button could invoke the method of our choosing without any additional code.