Don't Object to Objective C

As it turns out I don't care enough about writing a Twitter application as I originally thought. According to my research in order to get the authentication to work the best method is called xAuth. Using the xAuth method I would have to send an e-mail to Twitter's API e-mail address in order to get a key for my application. Being that it was just a learning application I decided that viewing the tweet string in the debugger was sufficient.

I just finished chapter 3, and we make one small enhancement to the InstaTwit application from the previous chapter. I added a text view, which was a new component for me, and learned about how to interact with the on-screen keyboard. There's no way to automatically tie functionality to the Done button on the keyboard. You can choose from various words for the button, but you actually have to tie it to an IBAction to get it to do anything.

While the chapter was light on coding it was full of detail on how Objective C was handling everything I was doing. Of the most interest to me was the way that memory management and garbage collection was done. Objective C uses something called reference counting. Certain things like calling retain, and alloc will increase the reference count by one, and other things like release will decrease the reference count by one. When the reference count reaches zero it will be cleaned up. Methods are also called in a different way than in most languages. They are called inside of brackets rather than with a period or arrow operator.

After a chapter of getting more in depth in Objective C we are ready for a chapter getting more in to depth about iOS. The next chapter will show me how to implement applications with more than one view. This should set me up nicely to make my own multiple view apps.