Tuesday, May 6, 2008

First App

A couple of weeks ago I went through Apple's "Your First iPhone Application", which was, no surprise, "Hello World".  But I liked the way the accompanying document led me through creating the app step-by-step, because I was unfamiliar with Objective-C, X-Code and the framework.  Unfortunately, the link to it is now dead.  I think it was pre-Interface Builder, so maybe they decided it wasn't worth continuing with.

There appears to be a replacement: Creating an iPhone Application .  Maybe I'll check that out.

Monday, May 5, 2008

First post - catching up

Hey, my first post on my new blog!

Let's see if I can catch up in a paragraph or two (or maybe three). OK, so there I am in my mom's fallopian tubes...  Seriously, I love developing software.  I started doing it in the fifth grade (on an IBM mainframe), managed to continue in high school (on Commodore Pets and TRS-80s), stumbled on the fact that you could actually get a degree in this (Computer Science @ Cal Poly) and then found myself doing it professionally for more than 20 years.  I get a chance to take a sabbatical, and just when I'm thinking going back to work would be fun, Apple releases the iPhone SDK.

Alright, that takes us to March 6, just two months ago.  I'm e-mailing back and forth with a friend, and he asks me "so, have you taken a look at the iPhone SDK?"  Wow, I had heard about it earlier in the year, but had lost track of when it was going to be introduced.  So I go to Apple's site and watch the presentation.  Hey, that looks pretty cool.  I've had a number of mobile app ideas floating around in my head for a while.  Maybe this is the right platform?  A few weeks later (and after creating a preliminary business plan so I can convince my wife that spending some $$$ is a good idea), I'm the proud owner of an iPhone and a brand new MacBook Pro.  For a guy who previously designed PC clones for the #1 PC manufacturer, this was a big step.

So I have my new iPhone.  Replaced a Cingular 8125, so it's not my first smart phone.  And I can tell you, this thing is way easier to use.  Sure, I miss my spreadsheet app, and I hate iTunes on the PC (my Mac hadn't arrived yet), but I'm loving this thing.  It gets to the point where I start hearing "PUT THE IPHONE DOWN!" a bit too much at dinner time, so I know I'm hooked (surprisingly enough, responding "But, honey, I'm just researching Christopher Lee, the actor" doesn't help).  Anyway, I'm a geek, but the fact that I love the iPhone (as do my geeky friends who have one) and the fact that it is so easy to use have me convinced that this would be a good platform to develop for, i.e. there are going to be lots of them out there.

Next my Mac arrives.  And, the first day I have it, I lock it up once or twice.  OK, so it's not Utopia.  But it is still very, very, good.  And iTunes is way better than it was on the PC. (Oh, yeah, I forgot: my iPhone rebooted once or twice the first day I had it.  This is why fellow engineers like me to test their HW & SW - I can get anything to crash).  Download the SDK (16 hours? - man, it is popular) and I'm ready to go.  

Well, not quite ready yet.  Been a while since I've developed in C++, so I need to do some rust-brushing-off.  And I still have to finish that playcastle I've been building for my son, and, well, you know how it is.  I also decide that I'm going to do it systematically, so I start going through the sample code.  And I get Subversion working, because most recently I've been a SW process guy, and I'm curious about that...

So, that takes us to today, two months after the first SDK release. Time to look at more sample code, I think.  Maybe some design.  And perhaps another blog entry...