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All responses Most smiled responses
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I must admit that I don't have a lot of experience with this as Its very rare for me to ever need to display text vertically. Looking at the requirements of displaying text vertically i'd say that unless you have some specific niche reason for maintaining compatibility with iOS 3 I'd honestly shoot for being an iOS 5+ app, assuming that this is going to be a major part of the app because I don't think it has been till just recently in OS X 10.7 and iOS 5 that doing vertical text was made easy.
The further back you go in iOS the harder it is to do things like this and there a lot fewer users running older versions of iOS. And when you eventually drop support for older os's its just going to take a lot of work to change from 3rd party libraries (assuming there are any) to better things like Core Text. In the long run its just going to be more worth it to just use iOS 5+ api's to do this. If you really need to maintain compatibility with iOS 3 then I might ask StackOverflow this question because I am really unsure if there is any means to do this well while maintaining api compatibility.
All I can say is that personally if I was handed this requirement of displaying lots of vertical japanese text I wouldn't hesitate to make it iOS 5+ only and probably go the Core Text route first. There are plenty of users on iOS 5 and writing & maintaining the app will be a lot easier.
I hope this has been of some help. -
that is something I have not really done much with in iOS
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asked by yurieasy
I wish I was, but unfortunately the timing & finances just didn't make it possible for me. I will mostly likely make it out next year :)
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These types of questions really belong on Stack Overflow or the Apple dev forums as I can't fully answer this without knowing more information.
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First off I warn you these days I am vastly more focused on the Mac than iOS just because I need to finish my 3 mac apps before I can devote any serious attention to the iOS app Ideas I have.
Im subscribed to http://planetcocoa.org/ it has a feed that contains many cocoa developers blogs including my own
I watch the Cocoa questions on Stack Overflow, it's often nice to help other people if you can and sometimes you'll come across questions that you yourself want to know the answer to.
I listen to several podcasts like iDeveloper Live, IRQ Conflict, Build & Analyze, Core Intuition, NSBrief.
Many developers (indie & Apple Employees) spit out many nuggets of gold from time to time on twitter.
Aaron Hillegass's books are excellent material for learning iOS I hear http://goo.gl/68dok I personally don't own it, but I've read his other books and if this one is anything like the others it's worth every penny
Sign up for an ADC account and download the WWDC videos, they are GOLD. It used to be you could only get them by paying a lot of money to go to WWDC, then you had to pay a lot of money to buy them if you didn't go to WWDC, and now you get them for free. Truly now is a great time to be a Mac/iOS Developer.
To be frank the best way I keep up is by actively working on projects using the things I want to learn about and reading Apples Developer Guides & Documentation, everything else is just knowledge that expands what you learn there. -
If your new to Objective-C, take your time and play around with it. Objective-C is a great language, but for new people it takes some getting used to. Cocoa is a great framework as well, in fact it's a kinda odd feeling getting used to both the language and framework if you are truly intent on learning Cocoa/Objective-C.
Practice everyday, set a minimum amount of time and practice for at least that everyday, even 15 minutes a day is better than nothing. When I was first learning Cocoa I practiced every day for a month in my spare time during the evening and for the longest time I didn't "get" Cocoa at all then suddenly like as If I shattered a glass barrier one evening I suddenly really began to understand Cocoa.
Use resources like Stack Overflow & the Apple dev forums after you search google/your favorite search engine several times. Tell people what you tried & what you searched around for and that your new to Cocoa/Objective-C and people will be very helpful.
Read the Apple Documentation & Guides. They are generally very well written & contain lots of good information. Read any guide as many times as is necessary for you to understand whatever you are trying to master. If you want to read peoples books that's fine, but I may ask around how much of any book is still relevant (some books are written for a specific SDK, which is why I am hesitant in purchasing some iOS books.)
Practice, Practice, Practice. Work on a toy project and just play around with things trying to get whatever you want to work. Don't worry whatever we first work on is always horrible, yes you'll fuck up your first project badly, but then so did I. My first project is still on the internet somewhere and I am so ashamed of it Im almost afraid to google for it and read my old source code.
Don't let people get you down if they criticize your code or user interface. Good friends will criticize the shit out of your code and user interface, they'll find anything they can to make your app crash, expose a bug, etc. You want people like this around you, they are excellent in helping you make your app better. When you get over that first piece of criticism and directly address it your app becomes better.
Always strive to become a better programmer than you are right now. It doesn't matter how good you are or how much you suck at Cocoa, being determined to become a better programmer is key.
Lastly I like Aaron Hillegass's quote
"Yes, this is hard. No, you are not stupid." -
For general multi threading books I only have gotten <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201633922?ie=UTF8&tag=coliwhee-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0201633922">Programming with POSIX(R) Threads</a>
However this is for the old POSIX API's. In general I would read up on Grand Central Dispatch and NSOperation
http://developer.apple.com/technologies/mac/snowleopard/gcd.htmlhttp://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Performance/Reference/GCD_libdispatch_Ref/Reference/reference.html
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Performance/Reference/GCD_libdispatch_Ref/GCD_libdispatch_Ref.pdf
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/NSOperation_class/Reference/Reference.html
http://developer.apple.com/cocoa/managingconcurrency.html
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/General/Conceptual/ConcurrencyProgrammingGuide/OperationObjects/OperationObjects.html
Between blocks with grand central dispatch and NSOperation, you've got some incredibly powerful and easy multithreading tools. However beware, just because it's easy it's still dangerous at times. There is a reason multithreading is compared to juggling chainsaws. -
No, but for a long time I've always had a copy of the objc runtime source code on my MBP. From time to time I browse it and study the source code to better understand objective-c.
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I do tech support for 100+ stores (200+ around Halloween through Christmas) with several other people, I won't say where I work but it's associated with a very well known company. Won't say not necessarily because Im ashamed or anything, more that Im immensely focused more on the future.
I am working right now in my free time on the products I hope to launch with to eventually become a Mac Indie Developer. The sooner I can do this the better :) -
I spent time learning German & Spanish and didn't really grow to like either. If I ever get to be fluent in Japanese I may try my hand at Chinese or return to German.
After German I decided I wanted to try and break from learning any romantic language (latin based languages) and go for a language that has a different root base (origin) entirely. Japanese has been one of those languages that has always interested me, but i've never had the resources to learn (no High School or College Japanese Class available to take.) Also I slowly drifted into Anime and I got sick sometimes of how it's translated into English. In some Animes adult jokes or situations are heavily watered down. Plus I wanted an intellectual challenge and an activity to do with people not primarily involved in tech/programming.
So I decided to dive into Japanese and I've really liked what I've found the more I dig into it. Right off the bat just the sound of Japanese is much better than English, there are fewer phonetic sound combinations & (compared to English) less chance to abuse sounds. Japanese grammar is really interesting, it's Subject-Object-Verb structure is odd at first, but it's really grown on me. Japanese particles have really interested me as well. Also the fact that Japanese sentences are far more flexible than English is also fascinating to me. In English word order can be critical to conveying the right idea, but in Japanese you can rearrange many parts of the sentence as long as the verb is on the end. Also Japanese isn't really concerned with conveying the number of items you are dealing with, unless the number of an item of something is critical. Items also have no gender unlike many european languages. I could go on and on as to how fascinating the language is to me, I really think Japanese is an underrated language.
Also I was interested from an intellectual point of view and just curious about how the Japanese text system worked or to be more precise how their Kanji ( Chinese glyphs used in Japanese ) and Kana ( Native Japanese text based on Kanji ) worked. It's really fascinating what combinations of glyphs used to represent items or ideas are combined to convey concepts. As of this time I only know somewhere around ~200 Kanji.
Japanese is just a fascinating language and I can't help but want to dig into it even if I never talk to anybody in it or use it for anime/shows. Though i am always looking for someone to practice Japanese with.
Someday I hope I will be fluent in Japanese and be able to hold entire conversations in it. -
Not married. Always looking for someone :)
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MVC was the first real app design pattern I was introduced to and I haven't had a problem with it once you realize what it's trying to accomplish. MVC safely decouples parts of the app that shouldn't be together. For instance if the View worked directly with the model, as soon as the model changes, every view that works with the model would have to be changed as well. However because you have a controller abstracting the view form the data it's interacting with, the view doesn't need to be changed every time the model changes.
If your looking for a book I can't highly reccomend 'Cocoa Design Patterns' ( http://is.gd/eobYj ) enough, it's written by long time Cocoa veterans and explains many design patterns used in cocoa very well. See my review here for more: http://cocoasamurai.blogspot.com/2009/10/book-review-cocoa-design-patterns.html
If your not getting MVC at first don't worry & look through open source projects and see how it is used. -
I have some ideas floating around in my head for things that could be done on the iPad. However at the moment I don't even own an iPad so that makes Developing an iPad app a little bit hard :(
Right now I have 3 Mac apps I am focusing on completing and while it's a little tempting to jump in and work on apps on other platforms I have committed myself to completing these Mac apps first and then once they are complete I will reevaluate what apps I want to work on and go on from there. -
Im both supportive of Android and critical of it because i'd like to see it succeed as a worthy competitor to iOS. While Developer relations have continued to improve in the iPhone area, it still mostly feels like a black box where Apple can at will reject you for arbitrary reasons. My hope is that as Android improves as a competitor to iPhone/iOS that Apple will relax some restrictions on iOS developers.
Android right now though feels too fractured in that it has a lot of nice ideas going for it, but it doesn't feel like there is any cohesion in that the areas in the OS don't present a unified design. It more feels like many nice things stitched together. It also lacks a lot of nice polish that iOS does have. I hope in time Android will begin to polish features and present more of a worthy challenge to Apple that will keep them on their feet and everybody will benefit.
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Colin Wheeler’s Bio
Computer Science geek, Cocoa Developer, learning Japanese. I chose Knowledge over Ignorance and Wisdom over Knowledge.
