Spent about 45 minutes working on Objective-C and iPhone programming tutorials. At times it’s a little frustrating to be going back to commandline input and output when I can jump into something like RunRev and have a fully functional UI app running in about 5 minutes.
The problem is long-term goals.
RunRev is great for quick and dirty multi-platform apps. For example, I used it to cook up a quick CSV generator to help me handle student data this weekend (EPAT outputs space-deliniated files, a major hassle to import into Excel for test performance analysis). But the speed of the programs isn’t great and there are some quirky limitations to the language (and a dearth of decent training materials).
Objective-C is a superset of good old C. It is fairly specific to Apple platforms, but it is possible to run Objective-C code on Windows and Linux. More importantly, I want to get onto mobile devices and Objective-C plus Cocoa Touch is the platform of choice for consumer apps. OK, I could do another language and develop for Android… but I use an iPhone and half my reason for developing is to possibly create educational tools to use in my own class.
Honestly, the biggest struggle here is not anything Apple or Objective specific, but wrapping my mind around object oriented programming. In some ways it is absolutely logical to me and I love it! But in other ways…. remembering to both describe and define objects can be a hassle… and the ways objects talk to each other…
Sure enjoying this though 