Big Nerd Ranch Day 03

Today ends Day three of the Big Nerd Ranch. Mark finished his overview of Objective-C and now it was Joe’s turn to take us into iPhone development.  Our first appication was a simple quiz application that served as an introduction to using Xcode’s Window Based Application template, Interface Builder, and deploying an application to our iPhone. It wasn’t anything fancy, we had an NSArray of 3 questions and answers that populated labels on the screen when one of two buttons were pressed. We went over the necessity for good memory management again, which is critical because unlike other environments (like your pc or mac desktop) there is no automatic garbage collection.

From the quiz application we continued onto building an application that utilized Apple’s CoreLocation library to pull our GPS location and learn about delegates. It was quite interesting, the only thing I can equate delegation to is setting up an event listener, or an ajax call. Where, once the delegate is setup to run, it will go about doing it’s task and report back when it’s completed it’s task without the need to constantly poll or ask for a request completion. Lastly, we continued onto an introduction to CoreGraphics, where we learned about Views and made a simple application that used CoreGraphics to draw shapes on the screen, add text and establish a ScrollView, which allowed for panning and zooming of the window.

It was a large amount of content to cram into a day, but it was very exciting to see the pieces of our hard work over the past few days come together.