Learning to make an iPhone app: My Story so far.

Ricky91t

Hello all,

So I decided to make a thread/post that will first act as reference for me and secondly help out members who are planning to try and learn objective-C with a bit of programming knowledge.

I'm a second year student in a CS degree and have done 2 years of programming, my second was using Java and my first year doing OO.

I'm learning from some PDF's I found on the web, thenewbostons iPhone lectures and CS193p lectures from Stanford. So far I've watched 8 lectures, I'm pretty familiar with the Xcode program, and the interface builder.

I noticed today that although I was watching the lectures I wasn't doing the homework assignments so today I fully did assignment one, and will be continuing on two tomorrow.

Hopefully this will spark some other members to learn themselves. It's pretty cool to see an app after just a few hours of works.

A screen of the first assignment, Design done myself :pac:

fasty

Nice one! Those Stanford lectures are excellent!

cgarvey

Good on ya, keep it up!

Woody_FX

Fair play! If you ever get stuck do a search on StackOverFlow. It pretty much has an answer for every iPhone related question.

Ricky91t

Thanks all! I've been far too busy recently unfortunately so haven't progressed with this at all, I'll get back to it soon though.

Ricky91t

Well I've literally got sidetracked for ages, and then this evening I decided to mess around with JSON parsing, then I decided I'd chance it in objective-C. I always planned to make a network application so this is a good place to start from.

So far I've got a JSON array with cell titles being pulled from my site and also 4 different images. I haven't figured out how to access JSON objects so can't do anything too interesting. But so far I've got this:
List of 'galleries'


When you try to view it :pac:




What it's going to do in the end: I'm going to make a small application that will pull the event from my website API showing a different image for each event on click another JSON request will be made pulling the images from the site and displaying them.

I'll also have a contact form and maybe a few more features

Ricky91t

Been messing with this since 9am this morning( Yay for summer hoildays ) I've not got a table view, navigation controller and mapview up and running.

Basically the app starts, shows a list of locations, on click you're brought to a new view showing a small map, and a brief description. Loads more to add but It's a start!

HeadBangersBall

Nice one, keep it up

Ricky91t

Today I purchased a developer license, current got 13 locations in the app and I've got 2 other features to add to it. Have a few other app ideas too.

Hoping to get this one nearly finished tomorrow( part of it requires submitting data to a PHP script and getting a .JSON file and parsing it).

Have also tested the app on my phone and despite loading a lot of images on start and then a seperate map view it loads pretty quickly!

Ricky91t

Started messing with threads today to make JSON and Web Image requests smoother( so the view loads without stalling for JSON and image data) I got it done pretty smoothly but now I'm getting major issues with autorelease and the pools I'm using( required when you call a method on a new thread.) not looking good so far :pac:

fasty

ASIHttpRequest will do asynchronous web requests and call back to the main thread if you want to avoid too much thread pain!

Ricky91t

fasty wrote: »

ASIHttpRequest will do asynchronous web requests and call back to the main thread if you want to avoid too much thread pain!

Cheers, I figured it out now after looking at the developer API I figured it.

I have a section which allows users to post data that will then be displayed in a table view. Does anyone know if there would be any issues with taking the device UID and storing it in my DB for spam/administration purposes?

I want to set it so if the user posts an offer, if they want to delete it 5 days later it will only work if the UID's match.

Ricky91t

Submitted the app last night in payment tier one ( as I'd like to try and cover some/part of the costs of the dev license) whether or not anyone is interested only time will tell.

Ricky91t

fasty wrote: »

ASIHttpRequest will do asynchronous web requests and call back to the main thread if you want to avoid too much thread pain!

Just wanna says a special thanks for this, I was having issues with NSData and NSUrl using the standard iPhone SDK request methods. I tried ASSIHTTP instead and I've now made my application much more error friendly(connection/server down etc) using ASSIHTTP.

Ricky91t

Ok, well here's my first app.

It's a paid app aimed at UCC students, but it's free to look at the screens

http://itunes.apple.com/ie/app/cork-ssg/id452859534?ls=1&mt=8

Edit: I waited till v1.1 was accepted cause of a poor GUI in v1

robbio87

good stuff... well done, I've just gone through the same process on android. Its consumed my summer, but it's been fantastic!

Ricky91t

My next free app, Weather Pic check it out here http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weather-pic/id455648408?ls=1&mt=8

Comments would be appreciated