Oh yeah – all iPhone this time. I’ve been a bit incommunicado of late – just darned busy. Spending a bit of weekend time teaching iPhone for OReilly, which has been interesting as well as rewarding. This past weekend was at Loyola in Chicago with 9 students – again a whole different kind of crowd from the folks I taught in either San Francisco or here in Seattle.
While I’ve been working on this coursework, Beth has been learning about iPhone development, sometimes helping at the classes and other times working on her own. It’s been really interesting to see the responses to her emails on the cocoa-dev mailing list. Some incredibly good help, a few jerks and their responses.
Beth’s made a screen cast talking about one of her challenges: doing the Interface Builder work to put together a TabBarController and a NavController. A common enough pattern for utility iPhone applications, and one that isn’t easy to explain or see when it comes to Interface Builder.
I think getting people used to using Interface Builder, including learning how to debug it and what happens when you make mistakes, is one of the biggest bonus’ of the in-person class. There’s a huge amount to that tool that just isn’t obvious until you see someone do it.
Heh – it’d be nice if the refactoring tools in Xcode would understand when you’d renamed an outlet too. That’s an interesting error for a newbie to run into. All of a sudden they’re going “Hey, what’s the key value coding thing and what did I do to make an undefined key?!?!”.
Anyway, check out Beth’s screencast if you’re interested in iPhone development. It’s well done.
Rhonabwy 