Wanna see me try to make an iPhone app in 2 days?

[fury]

Hey guys. Haven't been on here in a while. I've been pretty busy with work and my online game. Other than that, I've been trying to save up to get a new MacBook Pro so I can develop things for Mac and mainly iPhone, but I keep getting setbacks due to expensive car repairs, car insurance, and other ugly things like that. So even with my friends helping me pitch in to save up, it's gonna take me a while.

I have just come across a unique opportunity...My cousin, who you might remember got an iMac (http://www.everythingicafe.com/forum/iphone-3g/ilive-vicariously-through-my-cousin-new-member-of-the-imac-cult-36050.html), is taking a vacation for the weekend and has left the iMac to me to keep it warm. So, the first thing I thought of was to get the SDK on there and see how much I could do with the short time I have.

I thought you guys might be interested in following this adventure, so I wanted to let you know here. I've just started...I plan to blog/twitter my major milestones, but I know I'll probably come here first to get all excited about every little thing. :P

On my blog: http://www.ifury.net/mac/iphone-app-in-2-days/
On Twitter: http://twitter.com/fury

[MrEous]

*cough* EIC widget *cough*

;)

-Good luck on your 2-day adventure!

[Skol312000]

Make something worthwhile...Even if its simple and the UI is ugly... Make it help us somehow, good luck, i heard programming is a bltch

[fury]

Well, I don't have any ideas right off the bat for something worthwhile/helpful, unless you like to play social-type games. I run one on the web, and you can already use it with Mobile Safari, but scrolling is a witch, and having to enter login details every time the browser clears it is a little frustrating.

My reason for that choice is that it is fresh in my mind right now anyway (I have been working on the site a lot lately), so it probably stands the best chance at being the best app I can make in 2 days.

I've gotten that login form to automatically proceed from one text field to the next, as well as scroll up and down when editing another text field (believe me, the scrolling part was a lot harder than you might think!)

http://ifury.net/iphoneapp/Picture%202.png

Next step: get that Login button to actually do something! I don't know yet whether that will be easier or harder than the scrolling view...

[patrickj]

Good luck with this! An interesting challenge for sure. I'd say don't rush to finish too much. If it's down to the wire when your cousin is getting back, ambush him and kick his arse, buy extra time :laugh2:

[fury]

She's a lady, I wouldn't dare!

[Skol312000]

Hahha good one, hey, what language is required for the Sdk?

[fury]

Objective-C

Similar in many ways to C, with several object oriented additions to it. Hence the name. ;)

I picked up on it fairly quickly, as I am adept at PHP and C, which are themselves somewhat similar to each other.

It tends to make you think more objectively than I am used to in C++, PHP, and Microsoft Visual Basic and C#. It has a lot less tolerance for mixing static or member methods, tends to force you to do proper garbage collection (which is a good practice anyway), and a few other things that I think are just smart ways to do things in a programming language.

[Skol312000]

Whats your fav. Language to use? Why? And what is a "beginners" language? Whats the easiest, whats the hardest? Do different languages build different programs? What are "trojans" written in?

[patrickj]

She's a lady, I wouldn't dare!

Damn - it was a cunning plan otherwise :laugh2:

[fury]

Whats your fav. Language to use? Why? And what is a "beginners" language? Whats the easiest, whats the hardest? Do different languages build different programs? What are "trojans" written in?
My favorite language is PHP, mainly because of the instant results I get (upload the file to the server, and it's ready to use in an instant) and the variety of things I can do with it (I even made it control a web browser window in Windows).

I don't think there is really any one good "beginner" language. You just gotta figure out what works best for your mind. I tried when I was a lot younger to get into C++, and it was just so much for me to learn at that time that I gave up. A few years later, I dipped my toes into the water by touching up a few lines of PHP code that was already installed on a site that I became administrator at. From there, I learned more and more, and eventually wrote my own PHP scripts. After that, I was more comfortable trying to learn other languages like Visual Basic (I don't think that one's a good one to start off with - it teaches you bad practices, IMO). When I was fluent in those two, I ended up picking up C and C++ fairly easily. I also dawdled in a little bit of Java programming.

Take a look at the kinds of things you are most interested in. For instance, are you mostly inspired by the thought of making a website? In that case, the language options narrow down to anything closely related to web technology - a few examples are PHP, Java Server Pages, Active Server Pages (for Windows servers), Perl, and Ruby.

If, on the other hand, you would like to make a program that runs on the user's computer, you will want to look into programming languages built for the framework used by that operating system. Mac OS X apps are in Objective-C just like iPhone apps. Windows apps can be many languages (the .NET platform is the latest, which can be used by a lot of languages: C++, C#, Visual Basic, etc...). Linux apps are in C.

Viruses (including trojans) can be written in any language supported by the targeted operating system. Frameworks like Microsoft .NET or Apple's NextStep framework are often sandboxed, I believe, and thus harder to write a trojan with, so I think most virus authors tend to go for the unmanaged programming languages.

[Skol312000]

Awesome, thanks for info.

[fury]

I'm now trying to look through my monstrous 1.5 tb hard drive to see if I ever backed up an old Xcode project I made while using the SDK on a Hackintosh. I believe that one used NSURLConnection to grab a page from the internet...

No luck, but I managed to get an NSURLConnection to submit a login to my server anyway! :laugh2: