cocoa – Page 2 – ɔimoɈɒ

invariably…

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 … Continue reading “invariably…”

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.

iPhone developers: demand outstrips supply

Raven Zachary on the Inside iPhone O’Reilly Blog writes: I love talking with entrepreneurs and people passionate about their ideas. It’s one of the things I look forward to most in my week. Unfortunately, we are at a phase in the growth of the iPhone ecosystem where there is a significant gap between individuals with … Continue reading “iPhone developers: demand outstrips supply”

Raven Zachary on the Inside iPhone O’Reilly Blog writes:

I love talking with entrepreneurs and people passionate about their ideas. It’s one of the things I look forward to most in my week. Unfortunately, we are at a phase in the growth of the iPhone ecosystem where there is a significant gap between individuals with the ideas and those who are actually capable of turning the ideas into iPhone applications. This gap is almost entirely financial in nature. The demand for iPhone developers exceeds the supply and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

This is a good thing. We have a situation where it is realised that while ideas do have merit, they are worthless without execution and unless you have the ability to execute it, or the money to have that execution funded, then your idea has only merit going for it.

This is why I think xCake, though not fully formed, has some amazing potential as a way to increase the iPhone development skills in the province. The problem being that I don’t know anyone locally who has the expertise and the time to do justice to it. Stuart Gibson and I are meeting weekly and setting homeworks to improve our iPhone/Cocoa development knowledge but it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight.

How long does it take to become a Mac/iPhone developer? I’ve seen a lot of iPhone developers out there who have ten years of developing on the Mac and some with more (based on being developers for Mac OS 9 and/or OpenSTEP). It takes time.

XCake.org is now back up.

Comment spam is a pain in the butt – to the point that XCake.org ended up with over eight thousand lines of spammer links and crap because I allowed open comments. This overhead caused a huge load on my MySQL server and it affected performance elsewhere so, in the end, it had to go and … Continue reading “XCake.org is now back up.”

Until tonight.

Tonight I trimmed the Comment spam and removed every single comment. I also required a user to be logged in before they can comment. Smart, huh?

So what is XCake?

Well, I’ve covered it before so go have a look.

iPhone SDK tutorial videos???

I thought the NDA was still in force? Still – iphoneDevelopmentCentral is just great. I’ve copied these links to the XCake.org web site. Related posts: Can’t say NDAnything Developing for iPhone? iPhone stuff Og tutorial (part one)

I thought the NDA was still in force?

Still – iphoneDevelopmentCentral is just great.

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

Great minds and all that

Ian Robinson writes about Northern Ireland Cocoa Developers 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 … Continue reading “Great minds and all that”

Ian Robinson writes about Northern Ireland Cocoa Developers

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?]

XCake.org

The site is up. It’s for people interested in Cocoa and geographically on the Island of Ireland (North and South). http://xcake.org There’s just a Wiki there at the moment. More to come if there’s a perceived need for it. Related posts: XCake 1st Meetup XCake.org is now back up. Dublin XCake.org Meet, Thurs 26th March, … Continue reading “XCake.org”

The site is up. It’s for people interested in Cocoa and geographically on the Island of Ireland (North and South).

http://xcake.org

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

Cocoa Days 2

I’m not too embarrassed by this. It’s a derivative of the first example from Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, 2nd Edition. I’m not embarrassed because I did it by the book and then trialled and erred my way into producing this. All it does is give you a random number (seeded by the time) … Continue reading “Cocoa Days 2”

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.

‘IT Support’ doesn’t have to be boring

Gus Mueller twittered this great Flickr set from Mikey, the support guy at Panic. This one is my inspiration. Related posts: 6/100 How Flickr Did it Right Top 10 reasons for IT to support the iPhone Technical Co-Founders Developing for iPhone?

Gus Mueller twittered this great Flickr set from Mikey, the support guy at Panic.

This one is my inspiration.

Cocoa Days

I’m working my way finally through the Hillegass Cocoa book – but of course my 2nd Edition arrived 4 months ago and I never had the chance to read it and 3rd Edition is out and covers the new XCode so I’m going to be fighting an uphill struggle. I’ll order 3rd Edition after payday. … Continue reading “Cocoa Days”

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.]

No excuse now…

Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X is now available on Amazon’s US store. UK store to follow. This coincides nicely with my “Thursday Is Code Night In Bangor” plans. I already have second edition but I’d like third edition because things have changed. That said – even third Edition, though it covers Leopard … Continue reading “No excuse now…”

This, on the other hand, pisses me off. So much for Sterling being stronger than the dollar.

	Amazon.com	Amazon.co.uk	UK price in $
RRP	$49.99	Â£35.99	$70.06
Price	$31.49	Â£28.79	$56.05

Anyway, I digress.

Last night we worked from a different book: Wrox’s Beginning Mac OS X Programming. I don’t have any practical programming experience but I do have a couple of weeks of academic programming (spread across a dozen languages and over 20 years so I effectively know how to say “Hello World” in about 12 languages.) My brother has no programming experience but wants to spend his time constructively rather than sitting around tweaking his wolf.config file for a few extra FPS. We’d scheduled in a one-night-a-week session where we’d get together and learn to write code.

I’d previously considered my options. 50% of my head says to go with PHP or Ruby as they seem to be extremely marketable but I don’t think that I’d be happy with that. I want to make Mac apps and later, iPhone apps. And that realistically means going with Objective-C and Cocoa.

So we spent two hours last night having some fun with compile errors and yeah, it was fun. The material we worked on last night was basic to me but first time knowledge for D. And, to my surprise, at the end, D suggested that we increase this to two nights a week. As I’m in the house on weeknights I’ve been vegging out a lot, reading, writing stuff for lategaming and working through DVDs that I’ve not seen but this new productivity is quite motivating.

We typed in the sample code and then when we got it to compile correctly (the authors deliberately put mistakes in the code!) I suggested a couple of ways we could extend the code which wasn’t in the book and we resolved to do that as homework.

Good times.