Done?

Finished all the lectures. I'm thinking about skipping the last assignment since I don't really need to or want to mess with the Address book API and the search functionality seems simple enough.

I think I'll start on my app tomorrow. Don't want to give anything away at this point about it but it's going to be a simple that will help with tracking a small bit of information from world of warcraft. It's a simple idea for an app I had that doesn't seem to have an analogue on the app store that seems easy enough to implement. I will need to learn how to parse xml and use sqlite though.

My target timeline is to finish it under a month at the most. It seems a little long but I do have a job. I'll update on my progress every so often.

Presence 3

Finally got around to finishing Presence 3. All that's left now is 4 hours of video and one more assignment. Hoping to finish it by the end of the weekend but if not, definitely be mid next week. Then I can start working on an app. I could still use some good ideas that don't require graphics. I'm hoping to learn some non-OpenGL stuff as I go along and maybe make a rudimentary game. Which means I will need to come up with an idea where the gameplay will out weigh the poor graphics. But that's further down the line.

The first part of presence 3 was super difficult and the last part was super easy. The first part was so hard because of the threading for the status updates. I got lucky that I figured it out, it was a complete guess on my part, I found little help on the google group for auditors. But now I know that you have to alloc/init the status updates array right at the beginning or else it crashes. Go figure. One reason I didn't think of that right at the beginning is because it seems to load the array just fine in the thread but doesn't crash until it tries to render. Odd thing is the array responded to the count selector but not to any other selectors. Since it responded to count, I thought that is was allocating fine but I was wrong.

Presence 2

This assignment turned out to be more problematic than I first thought. The first half of it wasn't too bad. But the last half with the variable height rows were a pain the the ass. I see the merit in not giving the student everything but I think they should at least give us the methods necessary to do the assignment. Ah well, that assignment took up the better part of my day.

Halfway through the classes now, I think the last half might go faster than I had thought. Turns out there's just parts 3 and 4 left for the Presence assignment and then there's no more assignments, just lectures. Looks like I won't be able to make a graphically intense game though. A few factors stand in the way of that. 1) I'm not a graphics person. And most teams have a separate person that focuses on that aspect of the game. 2) From what I can tell, animation requires a lot of affine matrix transformations. Which I am ill equipped to handle with my psychology degree. 3) It doesn't look like the class is going to cover OpenGL.

Assignment 4 (Presence) Part 1

So lectures 6 and 7 were confusing. However, the assignment itself was much easier than I expected. There was a small hiccup trying to share data between the views because it wasn't covered in class and it wasn't in the additional class materials but it didn't take too long to find the process through google. Getting close to the halfway point now. I'm thinking I can finish the class in about 2 and a half weeks. Then I need an idea for an app.

Random Texts

So I got texted by some number I didn't recognize a few nights ago. Called the number the next morning, it went to voicemail, and it turns out I don't know the person that texted me.






Unfortunately for her, she said her name in her voicemail. A quick google search shows a public myspace page. Her profile picture has her holding a baby rofl.

Assignment 3 finished!

After two days of slacking and general lack of time, finally got around to finishing the extra credit section for assignment three. It took forever! I had to search the internet and the documentation to get what I needed to do them. The next assignment looks interesting. Looks like we will be delving into networking. Should be good, I have a vague idea for an app that would require me to get information off websites.

Drawing and Animation

Finally starting on drawing and animation! That was a hard assignment... was very difficult to find out how to get everything to work correctly. Took a long time... maybe I'll start on the extra credit section for practice. Tomorrow maybe.

Confuzzled

Got done with 2b but I am thoroughly confused by the two subjects they spend the most time on in the podcasts: Delegation and Memory Management. I don't understand the need for retain and release. I don't see a point when I would have to deal with it outside of the constraints put on us by Obj-C. Oh well, my lack of experience in programming is probably showing.

Took a break to look at some of the extraneous videos from guest speakers. Nothing too interesting. Took a look at their podcast of the student's final projects. Nothing horribly exciting there either. The traveling rock idea was a good idea though. I had a similar idea for a location aware mmo game but alas that requires a server and a server requires money.

Lesson 1/2

Finally finished assignment 1a/1b/2a from the Stanford CS193P class website. Took longer than I first expected. Damn semicolons and square brackets, I keep forgetting them. I also wish there were more examples in the SDK documentation. Trying to find the correct methods and then trying to pass the correct types or assign the result to the correct type was a pain to figure out. But, I was successful! Created my first program for iPhone/Mac!

Learning the iPhone

Today begins day one of my attempt at learning to program the iPhone. I downloaded all the podcasts from Stanfords 193p class and intend to watch them and do the assignments. This should be the easy part. The hard part will be coming up with an idea and implementing it. So if anyone has an idea, I'd love to hear it. I intend to start out by making utilities because I have little experience making games and no experience with OpenGL or any other graphics APIs. That and my art skills are extremely poor.

My goal is to learn a new programming language and hopefully, be successful enough to break away from my current job and make a living off this.