It’s been a while blah blah blah promise to post more blah blah blah.
I found this article named Programmers: Why We Do It by Tony Lukasavage and barely had time to read it today. Very good (and true, IMO) quick read about why we suffer through some of the worst parts of software development.
About a year or so ago, I was told of this site, Project Euler. Unfortunately I didn’t get into it back then, but an email from a mailing list that I’m apart of re-sparked my interest in it. In case you haven’t heard of it before, here is the description of it from the site:
I guess I’ve lagged on completing this blog entry series for long enough.
Indeed I was able to complete my application in the time frame I set out for. The application itself worked pretty well. I know I could have made it a lot better if I were actually able to get the application onto my iPhone during the development phase or have the simulator use the iTunes library as the basis for its library. I am now debating whether or not I want to put the application up on Apple’s App Store.
Let’s just get one thing straight here people, an object that is null does not mean the same thing as a collection/array of length zero. I’m sort of seeing this more and more as I continue my existence on this planet and I say we put a stop to this now. Take this example method declaration (written in Java):
public Collection<searchresult> getSearchResults(String searchTerm);</searchresult>
Straight forward enough, I would hope. This method takes in a searchTerm String, magic happens (ah abstraction), and a Collection of type SearchResult is returned. Now here is the kicker: what happens if the search query resulted in no results? What should be returned? And why?
I didn’t post yesterday mainly because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing any development last night. I needed to take a night off, so this post is about what I did two nights ago.
A couple of nights ago I decided that I should just start with my application and learn as I go. This actually turned out to be a pretty good idea. I didn’t have much time code at full stream, so I took the opportunity and what little time I had to set up the bare bones application, and by that I mean take what I learned in the “Hello, World” iPhone development example. I set up the buttons and label using Interface Builder as well as all the code that links up to the buttons and label.
There are two main parts left in my application: firing events and music control. Firing events I am working on right now which seems to be pretty straight forward. To be honest, if I wasn’t goofing around using NSLog I would probably be done with it right now. I am watching Star Wars as I code so my attention is split pretty evenly between the two.
Sunday, once I finish with some family time, I will get into the bulk of the music player. Thankfully I started this project after iPhone software 3.0 was released because, as it seems, controlling/playing music was not available to developers in earlier versions.
Wat?
Not sure how Apple could have thought that was a good idea. At least they saw the errors of their ways.
Thoughts so far: this is much easier than I had anticipated. Also setting up a new iPhone application from scratch and using Interface Builder is much easier the second time around.
Having completed Apple’s Hello World tutorial application, I feel like the application I want to write will not be that hard to do. I just wish that I had more time to actually learn the language and SDK in its entirety before jumping into it. After running through the demo application, I think that the application that I want to write will be pretty easy to do using the language, but alas “easy to do” means nothing without fully knowing your tool set. But I guess that is the bulk of this experiment; can this application get done in such a short amount of time with very little prior knowledge?
Yesterday, I began the (about) 10 day long experiment to see if I could learn about the iPhone development process then actually write something useful. Though I haven’t written anything, I thought it would be important to at least get familiar with the language itself, Objective-C. I saw down with Apple’s Objective-C primer and read through it. Though rather short, it did provide quite a bit of detail regarding the language syntax and semantics. Thankfully it no longer is totally foreign to me, but as I thought I still think the syntax is pretty hideous.
I’ve managed to avoid this dirty topic, however I shouldn’t any longer since I am going to begin on an experiment. How easy can it possibly be to make an iPhone application? Can a simple one be created in about 10 days time? Most would say “Yes,” however I have no prior experience with Objective-C, let alone the iPhone SDK, or Xcode. With all these unknowns, can sufficient knowledge be picked up and put to use to write a rather trivial application for the iPhone?
