Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Assignment 1A: Our First Interface

Digging around online, I found a great resource from Stanford and their first iPhone development class. I'll use this as a template to get started as I learn about Cocoa and ObjectiveC, given my OOP experience(1).

Might as well start with assignment 1A - basic interface builder.

We create a new Window-Based iPhone Application...

...I named mine A1A. I open up the MainWindow.xib file as instructed, and see this:
In the Library toolbox, make sure that "Objects" is selected at the top. I drag over a label from "Inputs and Values" (yes, literally drag)...
...double-click on the text, type in my own words...
And then resize it by increasing the text size and dragging the corner of the label to increase the size of the text label box - otherwise it will look like it's the same size.
Now to add the image view. Drag this again from the toolbox (from Data Views)...
...but how do we put an image in it. I found a nice Block M online... and just dragging it into the view doesn't work. I dug around and realized that you must first go to XCode, go to Project > Add to Project... and then add the image.
Once the image is added, back in the Library toolbox, select the "Media" tab and select your project name - you should see the image.
Drag it over into the Image View... and you should see your image. Bingo.
We build and go, and we are given the simulator...

...and the finished assignment.

Next time, our first foray into ObjectiveC.

Please, give any feedback you can about the style of this tutorial. Future tutorials will be mainly code snippets unless they are design-based - but the screen-shotting is quite time consuming!

1. My OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) experience is... there, but nothing to write home about. I've gone through the university's classes on Data Structures and Algorithms, and have done a bit of Visual Basic development (yay .NET) for summer internships. It's enough to where I can talk about it, but nothing proficient yet.

Is this thing on? (an introduction)

I hope I'm not alone here, but I struggled to find a great resource to conversationally walk someone through Mac development, iPhone development, or even Qt. There are tutorials scattered about, but not much of a community to help someone set up their environment or feel their way around this space.

That's why I'm writing this blog. If I need something like this, someone else obviously does.

My aims are to focus on four main areas:
Learning iPhone development
Learning Mac development
Learning Qt Development
[Insert your favorite topic here]

So, at the very least, your favorite topic will be focused on too.

I look forward to getting your feedback as I begin to build this site from the ground up, as I learn how to make my first iPhone and Mac applications, and try out Qt as well.