This isn't my first venture into the void, however hopefully this will be one of my adventures that stick.
Over the last ten months I had been floating in a void of unemployment due to a very sad story involving the small start-up company I had worked for from mid 2005. In October of '08, it shut it's doors (or rather, one of the financial institutions that had a small loan with this company, shut the doors for us) and I found myself looking for a job in one of the worst economies in recent (and not so recent) history.
I quickly learned that while Unemployment truly sucks, there were some benefits and it allowed me to pick up a new "hobby" in the development (or attempt at) of iPhone applications. I've always enjoyed picking up a new programming language and giving it a whirl, and I wasn't quite blind when it came to the iPhone, I had given Mac OS X Cocoa programming a whirl on and off for a few years. Objective-C messaging and syntax wasn't a shock as I think it has been for many other developers out there, and who can really argue that the iPhone platform isn't the coolest, hottest and most exciting development platform on planet Earth today? So since I had a lot of free time on my hands, I decided to pick it up and give it a whirl.
What I hope to blog about here is some of my experiences around the iPhone development process, in various libraries, techniques and coding styles I've developed with along my journey. I can say that while the iPhone 3.x SDK is super exciting, it has also been super frustrating for me as I had an app that was all set to go (as it was) until 3.x started to show up, then I realized how much I could benefit, and then to my horror how much re-work I would have in order to get it up to 3.x specs. (So much horror in fact that I more or less gave up for a few months.) But needless to say, I've been playing with the 3.x SDK once again and I've found my sea legs once again and I'm more excited than I was back in December of '08 (and hoping to get my first app out to the public very soon!)
I guess this brings me to my reasons for writing this blog. One, for my own documentation. I've been playing with controls that, at least back in the 2.x SDK world, were discussed by other bloggers/coders/developers as not working together well in the Interface Builder and that the common knowledge was that you had to hard code the interactions of all these various controls, which ended up being pretty time consuming. Since I believe that if a company provides a tool, which has the power and simplicity of Interface Builder, you should be able to use it to do your job, and a job I thought was pretty simple *if* you only knew how to use it. As it turned out, I found the little "secret" (which I'm not sure is a secret, but no-one else seemed to know the process) behind nesting tab bar and navigation controllers graphically in IB. And most recently I've been struggling with the MapKit and using a MKMapView item from IB in my app. The good news is I've found the way around these issues and now I feel compelled to share with others.
So my first post (after this one) will be around the MapKit, and I hope you other iPhone developers will find something useful from my experiences!
Oh! One last note (not that anyone will actually read this first post) I'm a very big proponent on feedback. Please leave your thoughts if you liked/disliked/hated/loved/etc any post here. I'd love to hear from anyone and everyone that reads my ramblings!
Thanks for viewing!
--Patrick Holt
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