Book Review: More iPhone Development by Dave Mark et al
Posted by
edgardoagno
on
20 July 2010 01:26:00
in
Books
General
iPhone
I've actually read this book a few months back but only got the chance now to sit down and write a review about it. Ok, iOS 4, iPad and iPhone 4 are now all out. First question is, is this book still relevant? Absolutely. If there is a newer edition to this one, with the newest iOS 4 updates get it. If not, it is still worth spending the £17 you pay for it. Although it would be nice to get more in-depth with the newer iOS 4 features like blocks which are the lambda versions on .Net. They would have been more convenient when writing fetched queries and manipulating the predicates.
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iCookieJar on iTunes Store on sale for FREE!
Posted by
edgardoagno
on
14 April 2010 22:27:43
in
General
iPhone
 This iPhone app is long overdue. But hey, better late than never. Apple has approved my Cookie Jar application to be sold for free at the iTunes Store last night and there has already been 126 downloads mostly from the USA, Canada and even one in Mexico. The North American reviewers are not afraid of voicing their opinions as the app has already had 5 ratings of which averaged 3 stars. Hmmm. Anyway, the link to the App Store for download is: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cookie-jar/id366840327. I also setup a separate global score board on this site which also serve as a support page. The link is http://edgardoagno.com/Projects/iCookieJar/
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Whats happening
Posted by
edgardoagno
on
12 February 2010 13:48:51
in
General
iPhone
I had a hectic January as I was moving to Manchester City Center. This moving business is pretty stressful especially when one has accumulated at least 35 boxes full of junk. It's now February and I have finished the Beginning iPhone Development book and feel the confidence in building applications for the iPhone. This is perfect timing as the new iPad SDK is also out now, and a new gold rush for iPad applications is taking place. Last month I also registered for the iPhone Developer Program which basically means I can test and deploy my applications to the iTunes Store. Exciting times.
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Book Review: Beginning iPhone 3 by Dave Mark et al
Posted by
edgardoagno
on
11 February 2010 19:19:31
in
Books
General
iPhone
Beginning iPhone 3 Development is a solid beginner's book. However I would not recommend the book to completely novice programmers with no programming experience. Complete beginners might wonder what MVC, protocols, delegates, outlets would mean. These are advanced topics although not difficult to comprehend may overwhelm the completely new beginner. If you have other programming background particularly object oriented language you will have no problem understanding the Objective C constructs. It does help a lot and makes the picture clearer when you understand what they mean. Like for example, the use of square brackets [ ] is the dot notation version in calling methods from an object instance in C# or Java. It also helps to know the notion of method naming in Objective C which is very new to me i.e. the method name includes the series of parameters involved in the behavior which actually makes sense. I am used to naming methods by just the verb without the parameters involved. I had to look this up elsewhere as I found the method declarations completely baffling at first. But like when you start using the Mac coming from Windows, you get used to it and if you think about it more closely, it makes more sense and is actually very well designed.
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Driving on the Mac-side
Posted by
edgardoagno
on
11 December 2009 23:25:10
in
General
iPhone
A few of chapters in my iPhone SDK, I'm finding myself like a driver on the other side of the Macintosh road. First impressions of the Objective C language is like when I first used the Mac Windows interface it took me some time in getting used to. I am actually learning both Xcode, Objective C, Cocoa Touch MVC and Interface Builder all at the same time. It's easy to get confused, but for a while it all makes sense. It's also easy to dwell on comparisons from a language point of view. For example Objective C's square bracket notation as opposed to object dot notation, is slightly bewildering since coming from a C, C# background I am used to having square brackets as arrays. The other language specific that my left sided brain needs to get used to right sided thinking is the use of colons. I am used to seeing colons as class inheritance as opposed to method calling with parameters passed. This is just completely bonkers to switch from C# to Objective C. But I will press on and see how I get on. My impressions of Xcode as an IDE so far is so far so good. It's very comparable to Visual Studio. Xcode does have it's own flavor of intellisense. Talking about the nib experience on the Interface Builder, I find the concept of Outlets as a controller access to nib objects a bit bewildering. Although the concept of the other direction of Controller Action being referenced by the nib object's events is fairly trivial.
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Hello iPhone SDK
Posted by
edgardoagno
on
09 December 2009 10:32:14
in
General
iPhone
Right. What am I up to now. I was deciding what to do next. I have a choice between Microsoft's ORM Entity Framework or a completely different language and platform in the form of iPhone development. After months of reading and working on web and Microsoft technologies, it's getting a bit repetitive and slightly boring. Don't get me wrong. I do consider ORM's especially EF to be important. It's probably even wiser to continue on learning Microsoft technologies because I've started it already. And there's going to be a big learning curve understanding a new language. I do have the book Programming Entity Framework by Julia Lerman which I intend to read and practice. I just thought that working on the iPhone would be much more interesting despite the learning curve. Entity Framework would have to wait.
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