davidnimmo.com Life, The Universe and Everything

6Mar/12Off

First iPad App Getting Close

I think I'm weeks away now from submitting my first app to Apple. It's been a long time coming, but with the discovery of Xamarin Monotouch - which gives me the ability to develop using C#.net (and .net libraries), development has advanced in leaps and bounds. I hope to share news of App Store submission, and (gulp) approval, in the not too distant future...

12Aug/11Off

iPad Development – Found: one mentor!

Apart from wanting it to be the perfect, all day, go anywhere computing device, there was of course another reason for my iPad purchase -> so that I could develop Apps for it (and retire to the Sunshine Coast hinterland, where I will spend the rest of my days writing Apps, Blogs, books etc etc etc...)

So far I've read a few books, learned a few skills, wrote a Hello World app or two and... barely made a start on a real app.

I'm hoping that's all about to change. How (I hear you ask)? I have a mentor, and we will meet up for the first time next week. My mentor has released 3 apps already, with one doing very well for him.

I'm hoping he can help me with development of technical skills, my concept/design, and deployment/marketing (as well as keeping me accountable to make some progress).

I'm really looking forward to it... Will report back here on progress ;)

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Breakfast of [iPad Dev] Champions.

19Jun/10Off

Learning XCode iPad Development

I have a confession to make - I bought a copy of iPad Application Development for Dummies. I've worked through the first worked example, and honestly, it was a pretty good intro. The resulting App itself is not something anyone would buy (or even download for free, although, who knows...) from the App store, but it was a good intro to the basics.

Before getting into the larger worked example in the second half of the book, however, I have gotten a little distracted by ambitions of wanting to make the whole thing more Agile... so off I went looking for information on Unit Testing, Test Driven Development, and Automated Documentation Generation.

Turns out Unit Testing is built into XCode. I have found a few articles to help me with configuring my first unit test... so far so good. I also found one article on Test Driven Development, but I haven't gotten to try that one yet.

As far as automated documentation generation goes, Doxygen turns out to provide pretty much everything I could wish for on that front, and seems to do a very nice job of it. There are various output options for the documentation. I'm using HTML for now - as a newbie to Objective-C and XCode, this automated documentation generation is proving quite useful in finding my way around.

Anyway, I shall continue being a Dummy for now, and will work through the rest of the book. Beyond that, I have my eye on a book by Deitel & Deitel (& Deitel) - iPhone for Programmers - An App Driven Approach). I remember enjoying their book on Java during my time at University, so I expect I would enjoy this book also, and they have a good approach to learning, which certainly goes beyond the Dummies paradigm.