I haven’t written much about my iPhone app, but now that I have some time on my hands, I’ve put some more time into it.
I’ve been watching the Stanford iPhone course on iTunes U. They had a couple of successful iPhone app developers come in to give lectures, which were very useful. One of the things that stuck with me was an insistence that you prototype the user interface. They recommended sketches, but my sketches are horrible so I decided to try Photoshop. I grabbed this Photoshop template which is really great except it’s missing some important UI elements, like the symbol that looks like a “Do Not Enter” sign that iPhone apps use to indicate “delete this element”. In spite of that, I managed to mock up some screens, get some feedback, try running through a few scenarios, etc. You can see my current iteration on my gallery. Keep in mind that I don’t think I’ve got the correct fonts or font colours for the standard iPhone UI, but I mostly did it for looking at layout and program flow.
As well as that, I was working out the data storage, including the SQLite tables and stuff. I was trying to figure out how to get the lazy load the data and only keep what I need in memory. That’s when I started reading about the 3.0 software and the Core Data API. It seemed like exactly what I need, so I paid my registration fee and downloaded 3.0 to see if it will be as useful as it appears. One unfortunate side-effect – all the code I’ve typed in from the iPhone book I’ve been working through has tons of “setText is deprecated” warnings. Oh well.