Properties make sense!

Ok, I finally put 2 and 2 together and understand the basics of the @property thing. Lance sent me a link for this blog that has some very helpful stuff on it. I was really struggling with assigning fields in a class and getting all kinds of crazy errors and app crashes. Turns out creating a property as a reference to a field in my class makes the whole thing trivial to use. Makes it more like old-school C that I'm used to. I'm still a bit confused by Objective-C, but at least I'm starting to shake off some of the dust and loosen the hold that Java had on me.

Some progress

Well, I broke the log jam. Since the iTunes U class, the interface builder has changed. The actions and outlets are no longer in the inspector, but rather in the library panel. It's buried in the classes tab, and then down below. It's sort of a pain in the butt to get to. Now I'm wrestling with how things work in Objective-C. I've been so used to Java that having to use pointers again is a little weird. I figured out how to assign a string to the label's text finally after a lot of poking around. UILabel.text = @"pow"; Next up is time to play around with parsing strings I think. Ugh!

Connections?

Well, for some reason when I created a new project, I can't create a controller object with connections on it. No clue why. I'm sure I've overlooked something but it's 11:40 and I'm sleepy. I'll play with it this weekend.

Getting Started

This is the beginning of my notes blog for building an iPhone app. I'm determined to build something, even if it's just a toy. I've got lots of ideas, but I'll try to focus on simple toy apps to start with. I started downloading the 2010 Stanford iPhone app development classes from iTunes U. Amazingly they can be played from my iPhone! I'll try to watch them from work perhaps when I have a lull. I've got Xcode installed already from a previous pass at playing with app development.