7/9/09 iPhone Simulator results (screen shots)

I successfully finished an online tutorial. I had several serious problems, but all of them were my fault – typos. Here’s the result. I took screen grabs of the iPhone Simulator as I took the steps. In step one above left I have a text box at top, directions in the middle  (“Enter your name above”), and a “Display” button below. In Step 2, when I “tapped” the text box using the mouse, the keyboard automatically slid up from the bottom. I typed in my name and clicked on the Display button. Step three shows the result: the middle text changed to “Hello Steve!”

7/4/2009 Dummies Book – deadlocked!

I entered  huge amount of coding when I followed the steps in chapter 8 of the Dummies book. After each time I entered the code for that step, I carefully checked the code. After finishing chapter 9, I compiled the code and it generated 20 errors. It wasn’t simply the amount of code to enter in, but switching back and forth from the header file and the main file that makes it hard to double-check. (These projects generate a lot of pages, and you need to enter the code in the right page and after the right code, usually a header page and a main page.) When you jump around like that, it makes it harder to check your code at a later point.

7/3/2009

I received the book, iPhone Application Development for Dummies by Neal Gordstein a couple of days ago. I’m nearly halfway through it now. Unlike the Beginning iPhone Development book, it doesn’t have a lot of applications to make (it goes over just one so far). However, it has a LOT of explanations for how things work under the hood, so that is this book’s strength. The author does expect you to have some experience with programming.

Would this book have been a better book to start with? I don’t know. Remember that I already have several docs under my belt – the Beginning book above and the online Apple docs, so all that knowledge is only helping me as I read later works. It is extremely focused on learning what’s under the hood. I think that if I had not had the experience with Beginning, then the explanations in for Dummies would have made less sense than it did. The abstract line drawings would not be as clear as they could be for someone who has not had C or C++ programming experience.

6/30/09 Apple’s online docs

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading through Apple’s online PDF documents. The Beginning iPhone Development book seems to cover the areas I’ll need to know to create my app. However, I’ll still need to customize it for my use. That means I’ll need to learn the underlying programming code, which is Objective-C. This information is among Apple’s online PDF documents. I’m not ready to buy any more books at present.