transient thoughts

Today’s the first morning I really can’t be bothered working lol. It’s interesting, I suspect that, in addition to general laziness, it’s because I’ve just been reading some less-than-entirely-positive articles about iPhone development. Oh noes, it’s not all good and easy! Time to find a new platform! Lol.

Still, now I can see how much I can get done when I don’t feel like it. I’ve been working on a basic game project (I’ll write up some more details about it in before Friday), and it’s been up and down a little. I got a bit done on it yesterday – it was amazing to see how much more comfortable I am with Interface Builder after the study I’ve been doing.

I’ve worked through the next two chapter of the book too, so I’ve now covered the material on the different types of View Controllers available. Again, the amount of extra functionality included with some of this stuff is really handy (like the Tab Bar automatically handling the management of items when there are more than 5), but I do need to play around with them a little more before I’m entirely comfortable with them.

For the next three chapters we’re on to dealing with files - File I/O, preferences, and SQLite Databases. By the time I’m done with those three, I should have everything I need to put together the initial version of this game

written by .klik2

Got stuck into the next chapter of the book last night, which dealt with Table Views. This is starting to ramp up a little in terms of complexity, but I’m finally getting an idea of how these views work (I was really clueless about it before).

It’s good, but I did find myself getting a little unconscious and just doing what I was told. In particular, keeping track of all the ViewControllers and views and .xibs and connections gets a bit hairy at times.

I’ve also been trying to extend and add onto each of the lessons in the book, to make myself think a little, and also to train myself in using the APIs to find new stuff. In this chapter, I added in some array sorting (which I’ll post about separately) and I’m about to play around with moving certain functionality (the convenience method for creating a new cell), in this case from a instance method of the VC to a class method of the relevant class.

written by .klik2

I’m working my way through iPhone SDK Development (published by The Pragmatic Programmers), which is so far an excellent intro to programming for iPhone OS. I’ve worked my way through the first 3 chapters, and it’s been great – things are starting to fit together a lot more easily than they previously had.

Anyways, back to it! Table views next!

written by .klik2