First baby steps in iOS
Everyone seems to be developing iPhone / iPad applications lately. And let’s be honest; it’s great hardware. Long battery life, good UI, looks great. I must admit that I’m one of those “I don’t like the way Apple treats its customers and therefore I do not buy Apple” people. So I have a HTC phone, an Acer laptop, a Popcornhour media streamer, anything but Apple.
But recently someone asked me if I would be able to develop an iPad application and I had to say no. However, the fact is that business is still slow and that I’m still using my reserves frequently to make ends meet (living in a somewhat country side area doesn’t help my opportunities either). So I decided do a trial project for myself, just to see what iOS is like. Having done Objective-C somewhere in ancient history and remembering I liked it back then, was a good motivator, and I figured I would be able to pick it up fairly easily considering all of the programming languages I have coded. So I bought a book and spent a number of evenings reading through it, until I felt ready to give it a try.
I’m a strong believer in that every trail project should take on a real world situation, so you will be forced to tackle actual problems and not just the ones you think are interesting. We have a hour registration system we use internally and is used by a few of our customers. The main hour entry is done via an applet and I figured that would be an interesting test case; hour entry on the iPad / iPhone. It required me to do GUI and communicating with the back-end. (more…)