Update: Design

Working on design this week for the iPhone / iPod Touch application.

I've gotten a good chunk of the requirements hammered out. Hopefully I'll be able to get the UI design fleshed out and figured out next week and get the MVC stuff started. This all hinges on me getting myself through the examples on Core Data either over the weekend or early in the week next week though.

Progress: Day 3

IDE Updates:
Okay, so a few of my complaints about the IDE over the past few days have been the multiple windows for everything, no real good way to manage them, no persistence for where windows stay, etc. It's been driving me crazy, like to the point that I've complained to my wife, who also codes occasionally. She's laughed at me. A lot.

Anyway. Since I've complained about this I've done a little bit of research and found that there is a way to get an interface a little closer to what I'm used to. This article on 'Reducing Xcode's Window Clutter' was the answer I was looking for. There is an 'All in One' mode that basically consolidates all of them into a single window IDE with a set of toggle buttons to change your viewpoint. This was a wonderful thing for me. Might not be as big of a deal for non Microsoft developers, but it's made the transition less painful, as the interface seems more similar at this point.

Language Updates:
Now that that barrier is out of the way I've gotten down to some real development. Wow. Talk about some serious differences in syntax. Now that I've moved into looking into more Object oriented programming in Objective-C, we're starting to see the differences appear fast and furiously compared to before.

Some basic differences so far:

• Definitions of Enumerations and Structures.
• Declarations of Objects
• Instantiation of Objects
• Use of Objects, Properties, & Methods
• Inheritance, Composition and Overloading differences

Later, I'll go into detail about some of these differences.

Overall Updates:
So, overall, I've gotten a pretty good feel for the IDE. I've gotten a pretty good feel for the basic language constructs. I've gotten a pretty good overall feel for the basics. Now, it's onto the intermediate concepts.

Progress: Day 2

So, managed to make my way around the Xcode IDE a little bit today. Got in, wrote a few console style applications, all throw away code, but all in the hopes that I would be able to get a feel for the tool. To some degree, I have a better understanding of what is available to me and what I can do with it. This is a GOOD thing.

Tomorrow, I have to take as a downtime day. People coming into town and I must clean and prepare for company, so no coding or exploration can be done. This is okay. I need the mental break anyway.

So in brief summation for today:

• Can create new projects
• Can write and run said projects
• Can set breakpoints and step into code
• Can leverage most of the debugging tools, although, a call-stack still seems to be eluding me.

Although, I want to get in and write something with a UI, I am not. This is considered rushing things. I will pace myself.

The goal for Friday is tackling OO concepts in Objective-C and learning the difference in syntax (if any) from C#. So far, language differences have been minor. The ones I've seen so far have been around pointers and memory management / garbage collection. (Imagine that?)

Anyway. Have a great Thursday and I'll see you all back here on Friday!

IDE Woes

The first thing I've noticed with the transition to working with Cocoa and Objective C has been the massive difference in the working environments. Visual Studio felt like home. Where Xcode feels like a foreign country to me. It is very much the same lost feeling I had when I fist made the transition from Windows XP to the OS X world. Nothing was familiar. I didn't know my way around. If it hadn't been for prior *nix experience I'd have been totally lost and a complete 'Stranger in a strange land' if you will.

Okay, so I've got this project started, no issues there. Pretty small potatos to get that going, great. Now what? I mean, I'm looking at this crazy IDE that is totally new to me. No solution explorer, no property panes, no intermediate or watch windows as I am used to them. What's a Microsoft developer to do at this point?

Yeah, I googled it - "learning objective-c"

This lead me to a few things.

• Thing 1 - Apple's Developers reference For all of us Microsoft guys, this is Apple's answer to the MSDN Help Library

• Thing 2 - Learn Objective–C on the Mac by Mark Dalrymple & Scott Knaster This has been a great book so far. It feels a bit rudamentary for anyone who's been doing development for a while, but when switching platforms, languages and enviornments, it is moving exactly the speed that I need. I think I would be overwhelmed otherwise.

So where does that leave me now? It leaves me with a lot of reading while I figure out the interface and how the tools work. I'll hopefully have a few small trial apps written tonight and tomorrow as i get more familiar with the toolset and will post a little more about the trials and tribulations. ;)

Stay Tuned.