Paper and Presentation

So I forgot to post both Friday and yesterday, so I'll try to make this post a little longer to help compensate. Friday I worked on my paper as well as read up on the Apple user interface guidelines. I incorporated some of that reading into my paper as well as am going to work on incorporating it into my app.

Sunday and Monday I spent a lot of time on the paper. I tried to follow the outline I made as well as fit in what I thought was the most relevant information. I showed it to Dr. Sykes when I finished and he had a few suggestions, which I took. I fixed up my paper and sent the final project to Dr. Bopp. We then met Monday evening as a class and discussed the elements of good speaking, which I found very helpful. Even though I've given several speeches and presentations before, most longer than 8 minutes, I still get nervous with every presentation I do. I do know that the nervousness does go away once I begin, I just have to begin.

Today I worked on my presentation. I think, as of this writing, everything is about nailed down. All I will do now is continue to practice, practice, practice. I really want to make sure this goes well tomorrow. I'm also interested to hear the other presentations and what everyone else did and how it went for them.

Thursday!

Today I worked with Dr. Sykes a bit more and we got the app to work on my iPhone! This is exciting because I can actually see what I've done on an actual device and not just on my simulator anymore. I spent the rest of the day working on my paper and reading through some of the documentation, especially the interface guidelines section so that I have an idea of what I need to have in my app, and I have a feel for how it needs to look. There's really not much else I can say for today. These are pretty straightforward 3 things, nothing too revolutionary. More tomorrow.

Further attempts to test on an iPhone

Today I worked with Dr. Sykes on trying to set up my iPhone so that I could test my app on it. It looked simple enough, but it turns out, it's quite a process. We went through all the steps, and it seemed that we did it all correctly, but for some reason, Xcode still won't allow me to test my app on my phone. I have an idea though that I'll try out tomorrow with Dr. Sykes.

I also spent some time working on the interface section of my paper. There's still a lot of work to be done on the paper, but I'm making progress. I should get quite a long ways on it tomorrow and see about beginning my presentation practice. I'll get some screenshots of my work and put it in the presentation.

I also looked into how to use tab bars today. I have not yet figured it out. It looks like it will take some time to sort through exactly how it works and how I can implement it into my app. Good thing I've got the internet and my programming books for that.

Further Progress and Paper

Today was a productive day. I came up with a brief outline of my paper and have begun working on it. I also continued working on my interface. I connected more more pieces to the "puzzle" and wrote some code to conserve memory. I also had a chat with Dr. Sykes about the paper, its contents, and my project in general. He gave me some more ideas of ways I can implement ideas, and we also discussed the most efficient ways to code the application. I also tried to get my project to work on an iPad so I could physically test it out, but it wouldn't work for some reason. Dr. Sykes said he'll look into seeing if he can at least get a project onto an iPhone to test. If I could see the project at work on my phone, that would be really cool. In any event, it's been a long day, and looks to be a long one again tomorrow. Time to get some sleep!

Serious progress - FINALLY!!

Today has been an all-around productive day. I discovered the error I had been making that kept me from clicking a cell to load a new view. It was really simple. I was calling the wrong method. I can't believe I spent hours trying to figure that one out. I was calling a method that fires when the user presses a button that can be coded into the cell, instead of calling the method that fires when the user presses the cell itself. It was such a small thing, but that's how programming goes. You live and learn. I can guarantee I won't be making that mistake again.

I also had a chat with Dr. Sykes about getting hooked up as a student developer for Apple so I can use real devices to test my programs on. Dr. Sykes is looking into requisitioning an iPad so I can test out my interface on it this week. We also discussed the paper and what topics I can write it on, etc. I've got an idea and I'll hit that full on tomorrow. However, I still really want to continue the interface of my app because I'm actually making progress. The more progress I make, the more I want to work on it. I'm at the point where I can create a new project and now I need to code up the class that stores the individual project information.

Time is flying, and there's so much I still want to do!

Day 12 - Cells

I've worked away the afternoon today trying to get a cell to show up on my Project view. I talked to Dr. Sykes and read the documentation until I finally discovered that there were a couple methods that I needed to implement that "magically" make the cell show up when implemented. There actually is no set "ViewCell" method from what I've come to understand, and that caused me some trouble.

Now that I have the cell, it should be an easy task to make the cell show another view once I click on it in the simulator. Wrong. I spent the rest of my time today trying to figure out how to connect it to a view. For some reason, I think my view's aren't connected to their implementation files, so I might need to recreate those and see. It's amazing how something can be so simple, yet so incredibly difficult. I'm really getting into this now though and so I might be able to find some time to hit it again over the weekend. I want to get the interface done by next week if possible.

Day 11 - Tables...not as easy as it sounds

Ok, so I've spent today trying to get my table view working with cells so that I can load a cell and use it to pull up another view. I thought this would be a pretty simple task, but it has turned out to be more difficult than I thought. I've tried many different approaches as well as read through the sections of my books that are relevant to this topic, but I cannot figure out how to make a table cell show up on the screen. I can get the table to show up and I can initialize the cell, but I can't make it viewable.

Maybe I'll have better luck tomorrow. Sometimes resting and leaving the project for awhile can be the best thing. When I continue in the morning, I might be able to solve it faster than if I continue to sit and hack away at it now.