Today, I fulfilled my goal of completing almost half of the CS50 lectures at Harvard. I then went to visit Mr. Collias and his team of programmers in order to overcome several initial challenges I faced in development. While he and his colleague, Mr. Morelock, were unable to answer many of my specific questions, I was able to define an effective system for future progress with their help. Mr. Morelock understands my learning methods to a high degree and told me from experience that I should not worry about the hidden functionality present in internal code libraries. Instead, I should use the provided template files without necessarily comprehending exactly what code is executing behind the scenes, especially with the limited time I have for this project. I was advised to find a tutorial on Objective-C that serves as an introduction to the specific syntax with which they were unable to help me as much as with implementation questions. I have located one that seems to be a good start at the following address: http://www.otierney.net/objective-c.html. Overall, Mr. Collias and Mr. Morelock seemed impressed with my progress in understanding how everything fits together.
A combination of their advice and that provided in the CS50 lectures prompted me to change my first independent application, RPG Calc such that it completed the same work with about 120 less lines of code.
Sadly, tightVNC, the remote desktop application I intended to use for a demonstration environment on a powerful desktop at my home was unable to function properly because of security measures. I have attempted to use port forwarding techniques on my home router to overcome this problem, but am unsure of the results.
Tomorrow I plan to work on the 42 page Objective-C tutorial, to continue reviewing C through the Harvard lectures, and to move on in the textbook if possible.
