XCode seems preternaturally sensitive to hidden control characters so tonight I’m going to have to retype all of the code in my project all over again. I checked it line by line and every { was followed by a corresponding }.

Frustrating but part of the learning process I reckon.

Still - iphoneDevelopmentCentral is just great.

I’ve copied these links to the XCake.org web site.

Some of us from Northern Ireland, who were at WWDC, are thinking of setting up a local Cocoa developers group to met and discuss development and technologies related to the Mac OS X and iPhone/iPod touch platform. It is envisioned that there will be periodic meetings, a mailing list, a web page, possibly guest speakers, etc. All this is still to be determined. The following 5 domains have been registered for the group to use:

nicocoadev (.org, .net, .com, .co.uk)

nicod.org

Earlier this week, we took John Kennedy’s idea for XCake.org and launched a wiki. Two years ago I’d attempted to get Cocoaheads Northern Ireland started up but attendance was pretty low. I’m happy to say that there are a lot more people interested now…

[EDIT: This would be a nice topic at BarCamp?]

http://xcake.org

There’s just a Wiki there at the moment. More to come if there’s a perceived need for it.

All it does is give you a random number (seeded by the time) and present it on screen. In big numbers. Between 1 and 100. That could be a BRP dice-roller! I’m going to work on a couple more iterations of this before moving onto the next project. I need to figure out how to call a function ..er… method from within a function because I want the ‘generate random number’ function to fire at start (using the awakeFromNib) and yet I don’t want to duplicate my generate code in there.

That’s something to look at while the nippers are chowing down on something unwholesome.

This one is my inspiration.

I find code to be hard. My schedule doesn’t allow for me to be consistent in my approach to learning and so I find myself flailing back and forth, trying to remember the stuff I wrote last time round and spending half my allotted time re-learning. It doesn’t stick much. I’m now convinced I need a mentor to do this who will work through the examples with me, advise me left and right and not get all het up when I’ve had a crap week and didn’t get the chance to sit down and work through examples.

My first problem comes with expectations. If I’m control-dragging connections to the left and right in Interface Builder, I was expecting some code to be generated. Instead I have to manually add these things.

My second problem comes with pre-generated code. It added in an import for UIKit/UIKit.h for some reason - and then when I hit Compile, it burped and complained about UIKit. Claimed it couldn’t find it. To which I say “Well, don’t frigging look at me, you put it in there????” This sort of thing frustrates me -especially when I realise it compiles fine when I change that to Cocoa/Cocoa.h.

Brilliant.

This error has nothing to do with using the 2nd Edition book. It’s a subclass of NSObject which comes with the UIKit.h reference which XCode subsequently has a kitten about. That’s just stupid. So either there’s something wrong with my XCode (entirely possible) or I’m just the worst coder in the world.

I’d say it’s even odds.

[And the result is in. I'm the worst programmer in the world. I'd added a Cocoa Touch NSObject subclass to my Mac application. Cocoa Touch has UIKit.h. Cocoa has Cocoa.h. I feel stupid now but I have to chalk it up to some sort of learning experience.]