It Starts...

So today I got quite a lot of packages in the mail. First, I got a new book. Head First iPhone Development has been an interesting read so far. It reads very much like the other Head First title that I read, which is a good thing, as it makes learning a new IDE (Xcode) and a new language (Objective-C) that much easier.

I also got in the mail a MacBook Pro, and a case to store it in. Let's just say that a Mac is not intuitive to pick right up for a Windows user like myself, but after some strenuous Googling of things like "how do I right click on a Mac" and "how do I take a screen shot on a Mac" I am much more at home on this computer. After messing around for a little bit I registered as an Apple developer (free until I want to debug on an actual iPhone) and installed Xcode and the iOS SDK. I finally had everything ready to go to start learning how to build apps.

The first chapter of the book is exactly the same as the C# book in terms of how they introduce you to a book. I was building an app right out of the gate. The whole purpose of the chapter is to get you creating a functional, albeit simple, iPhone app. It very lightly goes in to detail about how you accomplish this, but for the most part it's just taking you on a brief walkthrough of the various tools (Xcode, Interface Builder, and iPhone Simulator) so that you are familiar with them in the following chapters.

The app that I had to build was a large button with a text label on top of it, and when you press the button the text changes to some predetermined text that I hardcoded in to the event handler function.

Now, I wish the experience of the first chapter was as easy as I just made it sound, but I inadvertently introduced an error in to my program. It took me a little while, and a lot of Googling, but I ended up unlinking my view to the file owner. While I was frustrated at the time in hindsight it's better to make mistakes like that when you are learning because you end up learning more about what you are working on. Chapter 2 looks to delve in to the world of Twitter, so I hope to annoy some of you with my application's tweets. You can follow me at: http://twitter.com/myrx84.