iPhone progress

Things aren’t going as fast as I’d like. I finished the Apple “The Objective-C Programming Language 2.0” and “iPhone Application Programming Guide” documents. I’m about half way through Phone Human Interface Guidelines” (which I read at lunch) and also “Beginning iPhone Development”, which I read at home because I need to work through the examples.

I have a mental picture of what screens I need and what controls they’ll have on them, so I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just go into Interface Builder and build the screens. That might at least give me something to show off.

Is it just me, or is Objective-C a weird language? I find it annoying that I have to declare a variable and then give the exact same declaration in the @property statement, for instance.

4 thoughts on “iPhone progress”

  1. I agree that the syntax of Objective-C is very weird. The issue, I assume, is that they needed to make it backward compatible with C which imposes very severe restrictions. Try referencing an element in an array of dictionaries and the syntax is “interesting”.

    I also bought a copy of Beginning iPhone Development. I am not learning very much because I struggled through most of this stuff already, but I am impressed by how clearly they explain things. I would have saved myself weeks of head scratching if this book had been available a year ago.

  2. Steve Jobs WILL PUNISH YOU for not worshiping NeXTStep! Turn up your nose at Pascal, spurn Objective C? Steve WILL HAVE HIS REVENGE!

  3. Yeah, the @property stuff seems half-baked. Too bad XCode doesn’t provide some sort of shortcut to do all the boilerplate for you.

    Playing around in Interface Builder is a nice way to quickly put together a prototype and figure out how to navigate between screens. I find that I usually have to throw it all away and start over to do it right, but that’s not such a bad thing.

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