gull

[gull]

The sky had never looked so big and pale, all the color washed out, as if some old raggedy sky had been pulled from a closet and hung, the real one folded and tucked away, the way his sweet mama had put her good tablecloth in the cedar chest, saving it for company.

Western Wear, by Steven Gullion

[gull]

It's Alive!

So. After playing with toy apps on the phone simulator for a week or so, I registered for the Apple Developer program so that I can put apps on my Touch and, eventually, submit them to the app store. After paying $107 for the privilege, I was told that my application was on hold because Apple couldn't verify my identity. As it was Saturday, I was stuck until Monday, when I called the wonderful Apple developer support folks, who it appears, are all in Ireland, or who at least speak with Irish accents, undoubtedly a brilliantly calculated move by Apple, because who can be angry with an Irish person? Other than another Irish person, I guess. Anyway. Turned out my name on my application didn't exactly match my name on my credit card, but it was close enough, seeing that I am of Irish descent. Problem solved. Hold removed.

Eventually downloaded the 3.2 SDK (which you can only get if you sign up, pay, and are removed from hold by the nice Irish people). Had to install it twice; the first time all the executables were corrupted, possibly because I had the older versions open while installing. But after the second time, it ran. Opened the little calculator app I'm "writing" as part of the 24 Hours program, changed the target to Simulator - 3.2, clicked build and run, and voila, a simulated iPad running on the Mac.

It's very cool. I think it's going to be dramatically better than the iPhone or Touch.

[gull]

The Old Man and the IPad

Yes, I'm old, 53 as of this writing, with no experience to speak of in Apple development of any flavor. But I'm learning. I think it might be cool to document the process of learning to develop in Objective-C for the iPhone OS and possibly for the Mac. Maybe I can help someone else avoid a few sinkholes. And justify buying an iPad in the process.

I bought myself a Mac last Christmas (27" desktop) and I've bought two books on iPhone development, both from fairly popular series: HeadsUp and 24 Hours. The HeadsUp book has too many typos to be reliable. Feels seriously rushed, and if you have no experience with Objective-C, it will drive you nuts. You wind up typing code that usually runs, but not always, but in the end you have no idea what you did or why it did or didn't work.

Surprisingly, however, the 24 Hours book is very good. I've bought some books in this line before, and they tend to be simplistic in the extreme. But this one is solid and goes into decent detail about Objective-C. It's more than just "copy this code", although there are plenty of sample apps to build.