From the app!
Today I learned… ‘The Innocence Project’ is a nonprofit organization that exculpate inmates with modern DNA analysis
(pierluc)
Today I learned… Brown sugar is really nothing more than regular sugar with molasses
(jdore71)
Today I learned… That there are at least two movies called ‘Titanic II’
(xilef70)
Day 19
Last post was 15 days ago, but I have a pretty good excuse. My daughter, Livia, was born on 1/12/11! I took two weeks off from all work to help my wife (c-section) recover as well as care for the little one.
This is my first day back at work and I really want to jump right back into things. I plan on reading/watching the book/video that I already did as a refresher and I also decided I wanted to jump right in to the app store process. While doing the very first iPhone demo in the “Big Nerd Ranch” iOS book, I had an idea. Here’s my plan (briefly):
I’m a huge fan of Reddit.com, I’ve been an active member for over 4 years. I’m a fan of a lot subreddits, but one that stuck out to me as a particular interesting quick “proof of concept” app was the subreddit “Today I Learned”. I am planning on putting together a database with at least 1,000 TIL one liners and making them just simple swipes to read another. The app “Cool Facts” is basically the model for this. I think the “TIL app” will be a really fun app to pull out during a party or gathering and just rattle off some cool things that people have learned that day. I’m going to credit the redditor who submitted the original post and try to get this very very basic app into the store.
There are a number of things I’d like to include, but for the first release it will be barebones.
Day 3
I was super busy at work. Didn’t get to read anything today. I want to finish roughly a chapter per week. In addition to reading a chapter I want to tinker with small existing Xcode apps and get them to compile. It’s only 7pm right now. I think I’ll watch another batch of videos and plan on reading a few pages into Chapter 2 tomorrow. We’re looking at a snow storm tomorrow and I may be off from work, so I’ll have some time to read up if I’m off. Compiling to my actual device was huge and it made me feel like I was really making process. I’m debating on scrapping my current plan and reading “Programming in Objective-C 2.0”… We’ll see after a few more chapters.
Since Livia will be born on 1/18/11 I’d like to finish 10 or so videos and chapter 2 by then. I’ll have a lot of random hours in the next two weeks to dedicate to iPhone development. I think I may need to move my reading into my basement/office because working off the couch in the living room provides too many distractions. Once Livia goes down for a nap I’ll have to sneak down to the basement.
Day 1.5
I wasn’t content with just compiling resources on Sunday, so I went ahead and watched the first 10 Lynda videos and read the first chapter of “Big Nerd Ranch Guides - iPhone Programming” The first chapter included “my first app”, which was a small app that used a button press to show a question and a button press to show the related answer. The author stressed to press through even if you didn’t understand everything. I felt like I knew roughly 60% of the syntax (which I think for me was great). Off the type of my head one day later, I remember snippets like for a literal string you have to use @”string” and when declaring variables you use “init variable1” or “NSString variable2” NS apparently left over from NextStep in the early 80’s, makes sense. I remember talk about pointers, .h header files, .m files. I did some ground work and get my developer certificate, set my phone up to be compiled to, and played around with the “my first app” by creating an icon, adding a picture to the main window, and added a faux launch screen. I feel like I got a lot done in the first two days.
Snippet of today’s Quiz App:
Day 1
I’ve been working in the interactive field at an agency since 2001. In the late 90’s/early 00’s I learned Lingo (Macromedia/Adobe Director), AS2 (Flash), Javascript, Visual Basic, authorware, and a few others. I’ve developed, authored, and worked on 100’s of projects over the last 10 years. Beyond development, I work with After Effects creating motion graphics for projects, I’ve cut 50+ videos using Adobe Premiere, I’ve authored countless DVD’s on both DVD Studio Pro and Encore. I’ve done 3D projects with 3D Studio Max, I played around with GameBoy Advance development, and tons more. Somewhere around 2007-ish I feel like I started to fall behind a bit. ActionScript 3.0 had been out yet I always resorted back to AS2 to meet deadlines. My skills were being stretched thin and I just fell behind.
My work payed for a 3 day training course in AS3, everything was easily understood and I thought I would become an expert. After a few weeks, I fell back to AS2… Long story short I’ve been meaning to start iPhone development since ‘07 (I think that’s when I watched the first SDK release).
I’m dedicating this year to learning iPhone development from the ground up. (Amongst other things, getting my private pilot license, having a baby (7 days from now), working full time, etc.). I feel that my brain is ready to learn a new language from the ground up and since my AS3 skills are novice at best, I feel that I won’t have competing languages in my head telling me to do something different. I’m familiar with OOP to some degree and hope my course syllabus I set out for myself works.
I spent all day Sunday reading Reddit, Mac forums, and just random Googling to compile a list of websites, resources, books, tutorials, etc..
Here is what I got.
Videos:
Lynda.com - iPhone SDK Essential Training
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Books:
- Big Nerd Ranch Guides - iPhone Programming
- Programming in Objective-C 2.0 (Kochan)
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Bookmarked Websites:
Videos
- iOS 4 Development - Building Data-Driven Applications
- iPhone Tutorials | iPhone SDK Essential Training
- iPhone 3 tutorials | lynda.com breaks down the process of becoming an iPhone developer, from getting started with the tools and the language to testing and debugging applications.
- iOS SDK Tutorials | iOS 4 Building Data-Driven Applications
- iOS SDK 4 tutorials | lynda.com shows how to create data-driven applications for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, with Internet connectivity, XML parsing, database storage, and data presentation.
- Developing Apps for iOS (HD) - Download free content from Stanford on iTunes
- Download or subscribe to free content from Developing Apps for iOS (HD) by Stanford on iTunes.
- Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps
- Amazon.com: Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps (9781449381653): Josh Clark: Books
- The Pragmatic Bookshelf | iPhone SDK Development
- title: iPhone SDK Development, by: Bill Dudney and Chris Adamson, isbn: 9781934356258, date: Sep 2009
- iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide
- Reddit - iOS Programming
- TheAppleBlog – Apple and iOS News, Tips and Reviews
- GigaOM’s TheAppleBlog is devoted to all things Apple, Mac and iOS, with reviews of hardware, software and apps, as well as helpful tips, how-tos and Apple company news.
- Explore GitHub - GitHub
- Stack Overflow
- iOS Dev Center - Apple Developer
- Access a range of resources for developing, designing and distributing applications for iOS.
- Member Center - Apple Developer
- iTunes Connect
