Today was our walkthrough for the development of a simple new reader on iOS devices. The guys from Truphone came over to do it and were really helpful in navigating us through a complex IDE (Xcode) in such a short space of time.
The principle of today’s project was to use the news apps which we had created when we began learning Rails to render articles in an iOS app via a json feed.
Let me just start by saying that iOS development is hard! Well, it definitely makes you appreciate the syntactic sugar provided by Ruby.
iOS development is done in objective C which is a lower level language, think more declaration of data types – even the class of the return value of a method has to be defined.
Saying that, Apple have worked really hard to provide a great IDE (integrated development environment), Xcode, to write iOS apps in. It has substantial auto completion features and that’s really important given the extremely long and descriptive methods used. The benefit of this style of method names is that there is rarely ambiguity regarding what a method does. These days, memory storage is not as big an issue as it used to be so a longer and more descriptive method name has less downsides (besides typing them out but then, that’s what auto complete is for).
I’m sticking around a little later this evening to attend the welcome drinks and pizza for the August cohort which starts this Monday. And that means, I’ve only got two weeks left here. Crazy.
This weekend is going to be occupied with family time and thinking up/refining final project ideas so that we can hit the ground running next week. We’ve got some clue about possible final projects and I guess the reason we haven’t pinned one down yet is because we want to try and strike the right balance between doing something technically challenging and something which we can deliver on in two weeks. High expectations and all that!
I Learn to Code 