iPhone Journal I

Welcome to my iPhone Programming Blog, where I will detail the results of my four week research into the incredible world of iPhone programming.

On Tuesday, 2/17/09, I planned to read "The Objective-C Programming Language" on the Apple Developer website and then to review chapters 1-4 in the textbook I have (Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche) by creating a sample application. In fact, I read 40 pages of the 105 page programming guide and realized that the remainder of the guide was very technical and unnecessary for basic applications. As I gain more experience, the rest should make more sense to me.
Next, I located a series of introductory C programming videos on the Harvard University website and have found that they are exceptionally effective in demonstrating programming principles. Each day I shall use these as an effective way to gain background information in the C language which forms the basis for Objective-C.
I then decided to create the example application mentioned above. First, I had to reinstall the iPhone SDK because the iPhone was updated since I last wrote an application. Following the directions in the iPhone Developers Portal, I created a new App Id for the applications I will be writing and added this to a new development profile for uploading applications to the iPhone. While reviewing concepts from my textbook, I created a simple application that fills out a "Mad Lib" from the game book "Madagascar Mad Libs: World's Greatest Word Game," by Roger Price and Leonard Stern. This application works very well and is pictured below.

Finally, I decided that the most effective way to create a journal entry would be through a screencast, a video of my computer screen accompanied with audio. After some experimentation, I determined how to accomplish this with my favorite video viewing and capturing application, VLC, along with Audacity, which records audio. Since the video and audio were asynchronous, I needed to combine them with a video editing program. After about an hour of frustration with iMovie '08, one of the worst editing applications in existence (in my opinion), I created an effective screencast. Soon I realized that iMovie '08 had exported a 130 MB movie file and I spent another hour or two before discovering that the application Garageband was capable of exporting a high quality file requiring only 14 MB. I added this file to an email and sent it on its way. About 10 minutes later, I received an email stating that the recipient server had rejected it. As a result, I created this blog capable of storing files up to 100 MB, and processing continued for an hour without any signs of true progress. Now I have made this written journal entry to compensate and am rather irritated.
On Wednesday, 2/18/09, I plan to work on chapters 5-6 of my textbook and maybe chapter 7 depending on how long this takes. I will create another example application and continue to look at online documentation and the Harvard CS Intro tutorials.
~Julian Ceipek