If I had 85,000 yen, I'd feel like I had a lot of money (Week 2 Update).

Hello again,

Alex here.

They taught me in high school that the best way to start a speech is a good attention grabber. Well, the title wasn't that great of an attention grabber, but this also isn't a speech; I think it's a fair trade-off.

Getting down to business: This week proved to be very productive for me. I completed several individual projects successfully, and gained a significant amount of confidence in coding with Objective-C on the iPad. Additionally, the AL team was, having spent week 1 researching, was finally able to work as a team.

We started the week by joining together to create our first legitimate iPad app, a basic currency converter. It started off as nothing fancy, and was done in less than a day. It simply prompted the user to enter the amount of money they had, as well as the exchange rate. Upon pressing a giant, white, and shiny button, the user is presented with the converted amount. This was a great start, as it gave us...

• Good practice with the interface builder, specifically connections,
• A chance to see our efforts create something useful,
• Experience working together as a team, and
  
• An opportunity to find accessibility issues that we may encounter while making "real" apps.

However, our currency converter was really just a glorified calculator; We needed something more advanced to work on. Having gained more confidence, we decided to venture into using two UISegmentedControl objects to allow the user to actually select units of currency. We allowed 5 currencies to be selected. This proved to be more challenging, but we eventually perfected the app. Additionally, we learned small bits of information along the way. For example, we found out that a) making UITextField and UISegmentedControl objects accessible will be challenging, b) how to trigger events without having to use a giant button, and c) how to link objects together better in the MVC paradigm. The result was a very professional and functional currency converter app.

After the currency converter was finished, we worked on individual ventures for the remainder of the week. I accomplished two main tasks, and got started on a third. My first solo-project was to attempt to get the complex UIPickerView to work. I found a good example in an iPhone tutorial here, and was able to create a tip calculator in which the user can select the tip amount for the bill using a UIPickerView. During this, I also learned how to make the keyboard deactivate when a user presses ENTER, as well as how to perform custom tasks once the View has loaded.

My second task was to try and customize my apps via the code more, without the use of the Interface Builder. I spent time on Google getting more comfortable with the API, and learning about the common attributes of UI objects. I was able to change colors and fonts onLoad, as well as a few other fun things. I used this information to customize the previous currency converter app to be more visually accessible. In doing so, I learned more about the flexibilities and limitations of the UISegmentedControl object.

Lastly, I started on a simple calculator app from scratch. The goal of this app is to make sure that the apps that I have created with the aid of tutorials have translated directly into permanent knowledge and skill.

Also, we're getting brand-new iMacs; Lucky us! We hope to actually start putting apps on to the iPad itself next week.

Until next week...

- Alex