Week 1...we begin!

Hey,

Alex, Abhishek, and I will be writing weekly entries about our thoughts on what we did that week for the project, and on the project overall.

This was our first week with the project, and we've started by becoming acquainted with each other and with the tools that we will be using for the project.  I've never worked with a lot of the tools we're going to use and so I spent a couple hours this week becoming familiar with Xcode (an IDE that is often used for developing software for iOS and OSX), the MacBook, and the iPad.  Alex and I had not had much experience using an iPad before so for a while on Tuesday we tried it out and got a feel of what it was capable of and that helped us get an idea of things we will need to keep in mind throughout the project.

We will also need to become familiar with the language Objective-C itself.  I haven't had experience programming in C before, and this might make it more difficult for me to learn Objective-C.  I have heard some people say that it'll be better since I won't be stuck in a C "mindset", and I have heard others say that not knowing C will make this harder.

A lot of Objective-C tutorials and iPad development tutorials that I've looked at assume that the programmer is already fluent in C, and this made finding a starting point a little bit more difficult. Alex showed me how to find relevant books through the college's online library system and we ended up finding an Objective-C book that was intended for people who are fluent in Java but not in C.  Since most of my programming experience has been with Java, I found the book more helpful than a lot of the other resources I found, since it explained things in reference to a language I already understood.

After reading a little bit about the language, we began experimenting with it on Thursday, once we got the iOS sdk & Xcode installed.  The tutorials we found made a lot more sense now that I had read a bit about the language, and I was able to get through a couple of them.  I decided to start with the usual "Hello, World!" tutorials for Objective-C and then I found a tutorial for a simple application for the iPad...it was a very short tutorial but it allowed me to check out the iPad simulator and now I have something I can try putting on the iPad next Tuesday. 

I found another, lengthier Objective-C tutorial which is for a currency converter but I decided to work on it a bit because it was very detailed and incorporated a lot of different features of Xcode and Objective-C.  It helped me learn how to do a lot of basic things, like work with the Interface Builder, and unlike a lot of tutorials it explained why I was doing certain things rather than just telling me to do them.

I think this week was a good start and it's made me very eager to work on this project.  I'm going to be working with a lot of technology that I haven't had much experience with and although that's a little intimidating, I feel like this project will be an amazing learning experience for me.

-Lindsey