Big Nerd Ranch Day 06

Today ends the last full day of the Big Nerd Ranch iPhone Bootcamp. Hard to believe tomorrow’s a half day and we all go our separate ways, it’s even harder to believe the amount of information that’s been crammed into my skull over the last 6 days!

Today’s lessons were WebKit, Web Services, Media and OpenGL ES. The first three were very good and was of particular interest to me, since being a web developer, and web services are the way things are headed. The Media portion was fun, we got to learn how to play music, video and audio clips. OpenGL ES was a tough chapter. The exercise was very long, lots of typing, but it served as an intro to how difficult OpenGL ES is… There was an exceptional amount of code used to establish an OpenGL ES View, but once we were done, it wasn’t hard to see why OpenGL ES is powerful. We animated a box on the screen, which doesn’t sound that fantastic, but the animation on screen was exceptionally smooth and fast; this became even evident when I randomized the color background every screen refresh, which showed how has OpenGL can cycle colors, while animating the box.

The highlight of the day was when 11 of us took advantage of the Banning Mill’s Zip Line Tour. I’m not sure if having been working so much with the iPhone that I became more bold, but this tour had us start off a very high tower and had us riding a cable across the property at 40 miles/hour 150feet in the air — and I’m afraid of heights too! We ended up going across three zip lines and crossing several cable suspension bridges high above the valley. Quite an experience, and one that I’m glad I didn’t miss out on, I’ll post some videos and photos when I return home and have a chance to process them.

Tomorrow, we go over a few last topics, the Address Book, Resources, and we’ll touch on SQLLite. by 1pm we’ll be back on a bus to the airport and we all return to our normal lives, but better equipped to build the next great iPhone app!