Belfast Metropolitan College have released details of their iPhone course. Starts on the 28th January, and us every Thursday evening for 15 weeks. It costs a mere £68 and is being run by an experienced developer.
See page 22 of the Belfast Met prospectus.
(and yes, if it hadn’t been on a Thursday, I’d have been in there)
From Vinny Coyne, loyal member of XCake, an announcement of his new iPhone Course:
Just a quick announcement that I will be teaching a beginners course in iPhone Development in Newlands Cross, Dublin from 21st to 25th September inclusive. We are also running a competition for two places in the course.
The course will be a healthy mix of theory and lab coding exercises. I’ll be going into the fundamentals of Objective-C and the iPhone SDK, as well as a peek at some of the more complex aspects of iPhone apps.
By the end of the course, candidates will be able to create their own iPhone apps which make the most of the platform’s features (such as location-based services, Google Maps integration, accelerometer functions, web-connectivity, etc) and sell them on the Apple App Store to millions of iPhone & iPod touch users.
Candidates should have experience with at least one object-oriented programming language before attending. Also, an Intel-based MacBook with the iPhone SDK installed will be required. MacBooks can also be rented for the week for an additional fee.
For more information, see iPhone Apps Ireland or download the PDF brochure here.
We’re also running a competition to give away two places at the course for two people currently unemployed.
Register ASAP before you miss your opportunity.
I’ve also been speaking to Vinny about the need for an iPhone course in Belfast. Who’s up for attending that?
This morning I took the kids to our local indoor play park and settled on a chair with a bottle of something diet and started again on my code. This morning’s project was the View Switcher app from Jeff LaMarche and Dave Mark’s Beginning iPhone Development.
But I’m stuck.
I need to resize this blue bit but the size boxes are greyed out. I’m going to have to go and re-read some stuff but I can’t find a way through this.
Argh.
Recently when travelling, I wanted some way to record my location and found that most of the apps out there were designed for hikers or people on trail bikes. I just wanted something simple.
So I figured – an app that grabs your location and with the click of a button, pastes it into an email and allows you to send it to anyone. On launch the app will grab your location and populate the locations beside the two labels. It’ll also open a webview in the opper half to your location in Google Maps.
Yes, it looks like ass.
It’s evident I need to put away Interface Builder and start using pen and paper. Jamie Neely of FRONT explains a little about why you should dump the computer and use pen and paper at a University of Ulster Masterclass they presented earlier this week – he’s applying it to information architecture but it’s the same with design.
I’m going to evolve this app and ’show my working’ and code on the blog in the ‘code’ category.
About a hundred years ago in 1995 I was being taught Modula-2. And I loathed it.
One thing I took home from it was to somewhat intelligently name your variables.
This is why the Hillegass Cocoa bible is causing some upset for me. They use terms like ‘tableView’ and I’m never sure if these are reserved keywords or if they’re variables. This means you’re groping around in the dark a lot of the time in the hope that you can figure things out. i.e.
-(NSInteger)numberOfRowsInTableView:(NSTableView *)taskList
{
return [taskStore count];
}-(id)tableView:(NSTableView *)taskList \
objectValueForTableColumn:(NSTableColumn *)tableColumn \
row:(NSInteger)row
{
return [taskStore objectAtIndex:row];
}
took me an hour to figure out that where I have ‘taskList’ the book used ‘tableView’ which makes it just harder to understand. The code above still uses one ‘tableView’ but it works. If I replace that with something else, it breaks.
Yes, I am stupid. And a n00b. Sue me.