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Showing posts from 2015

September in (and out of) iOS

This month my intention was to continue the Udacity Nanodegree program. I think the learn-by-doing approach it takes is great, and usually works well for me. However, in a fit of frustration -- wrestling with NSRegularExpression for something that would be trivial in many other languages and forgetting about the .rangeOfString method -- I began to reflect on the overall experience and my approach to learning at this point. What were really my goals in becoming a better iOS programmer? I'm familiar with enough of the APIs and resources for learning, can wade through the docs if necessary, have built some toy apps, etc. So why the urgency to add more to the never-ending list of things to keep up with (in code, business and law)? What other stuff would get put on the backburner for a while?  Well, part of the problem is that the other stuff is never really on the backburner. I spend my days in Ruby and the browser, and absolutely love it, and my subway rides reading articles and

August in iOS

Last year I began working with iOS right around the time Swift came out. While I'm glad to have some familiarity with Objective C, Swift is much more comfortable (coming from working mostly in Ruby and Javascript). I soon dove in! While this blog's been silent in 2015 so far, I've got tons of draft posts sitting around that need to see the light of day. One new commitment I've made is to start posting a monthly rundown of tips, tricks and adventures as I get back into iOS development, similar to the TMIL (This Month I Learned) series I posted in 2014. Zooming back to last year when I wanted to start learning another programming ecosystem beyond the web world I know and love, here are a few of the resources that helped me get started (and very much continue to help) with the world of iOS: The Swift Programming Language  ( iBooks )  http://www.raywenderlich.com/ https://www.objc.io/   WWDC videos ( 2015 , 2014 ) Introducing iOS 8 CS 193P Zooming forward to