Week 2...we experiment with XCode and Objective-C!

Hey all,

Alex already explained a bit about the currency converter application we worked on this week so I won't talk about that too much.  I started working on it on my own last week, but on Tuesday we decided to start it over as a group and take turns coding and talking through what we were doing.  I thought that this was more helpful than simply following the tutorial on our own, since we could talk to each other about what we were coding and clarify that we understood what we were writing. 

I had to leave early on Tuesday since I had shifted my hours around for the week a little bit, and so I wasn't there during the whole process of making the currency calculator and so on Thursday I needed to look over what Alex and Abhishek had written while I was gone.  I felt like I understood Objective-C less because I wasn't there for part of the project, so I decided I wanted to write a program from scratch on my own.  I wanted something simple to start with just to help me understand how to make a basic application in Objective-C.  You might be thinking, "Didn't you do that last week?" and I sort of did.  But I think there's a pretty big difference between following a tutorial and being able to write a program on your own from scratch.

Alex recommended I try writing a simple application where the user can type in a message and then the message will be displayed somewhere else on the application.  I decided to call the application "Copycat" and there was a text view (a multi-line text field basically) that the user could type into and when they pushed a button, the text would appear in another, un-editable text view below.  After I finished this fairly simple task I decided I wanted to add an image to the application since we hadn't worked with images at all yet.  I realized that even though you can add images in your code, it's much simpler to just use the Interface Builder.

While the Interface Builder can't do everything, it seems like it simplifies a lot of things for the programmer and will make developing Access Lecture a lot easier for us.  It's kind of interesting to me because I feel like Objective-C is a rather complicated language in comparison to what I'm familiar with (Java and Python), but the Interface Builder makes certain tasks so much easier than they've been in other languages. It definitely makes GUI development very easy and visual, but that probably shouldn't be surprising considering Apple's focus on User Interfaces.

I think working on an application on my own helped me catch up with Abhishek and Alex more, although I think I'll need to read a bit more on my own to understand it as well as they do.  Coming into this without any prior knowledge of any C based languages makes the language seem very foreign, but Alex has found a lot of good books online that are available for reading through the school, so hopefully I will be able to become more comfortable with Objective-C the more I learn about it.

See you next week,
Lindsey