Coding, Finally!

This week I was reading more about Human Interface Design principles for iOS.  The book provides valuable methodology not only to create visually appealing apps, but the ones that function and behave in a natural manner.  I am only about thirty pages in, but already noted a very good hint on how to determine your target audience, and then focus on it.

I’ve watched a couple of video tutorials and lectures as well.  But my main point of progress was the newly solved problem from Project Euler (which by the way has gone through a pretty nice re-design just a few weeks ago).  The problem itself wasn’t too hard to implement, but it was kind of a problem that provides very enjoyable coding experience.  I’m glad I’ve returned to Project Euler again, it’s a refreshing feeling.

Next week I’m going to continue watching lectures and reading Apple Guidelines.  I also hope to start a very simple Objective-C based project (maybe just a plain ‘Guess the number’ game) just to get into habit of coding in Objective-C.

Three Solved Problems

This weekend I've solved 3 of the Project Euler problems, the first one (#19) being the most tricky, and the other two came out right on the first try!

I'm feeling very confident coding in C++, and decided to begin learning Objective-C closely.  I've picked the Apple official study materials on Objective-C programming and started reading the textbook "The Objective-C Programming Language".  I'm also continue watching videos of lectures on Objective-C from Harvard University.

My goal is to start making my own simple apps by the end of October.  At the same time I'll be subscribing as a developer to the Mac OS and iOS development programs.  By November-December I should be able to write and publish more complex apps, and by January I hope to release at least two nicely done apps (in terms of coding and visual design).

There is of course the task of finding artists to contribute to the apps visual style and content, the task of making sound/music for the app (which I plan to do myself), and the task of marketing (which I may want to start researching for by the end of this month).

Next week I'll be watching lectures, and hope to begin coding in Objective-C, learning how to build navigation, menus, graphics, and so on.  The final phase of my project has just started!

Minimum

I did minimum of work this week (or at least that's what I consider to be minimal amount of coding and theory to say I wasn't doing nothing):  a couple of problems and reading about recursion.

Great experience was solving problem #18 of Project Euler.  I did a research about Pascal Triangles and figuring out the best ways to go through it, and finally came to a suitable algorithm.  However, implementing this algo wasn't a trivial thing as I first had imagined.  Several attempts with false results, couple of surpising realisations, and finally the bright insight which allowed for me to finish the problem and understand a few key points about casting a real-life approach into code.

I'm at problem #19 and have already misinterpreted it but came up with the result (sure enough it was wrong which made me to read the problem description more closely).  I think tomorrow I'll finish coding the problem as it should be, and will have whole week ahead to work on other problems as well.

This Monday it's Labour Day in USA, so my congratulations to all my US readers, and have a great holidays!!

Work

This is my first week after summer vacation, and working at two jobs at once is clearly taking much more time than just doing one of them.  For my studies this means that the pace has dropped.  I did read the C++ textbook, I did watch a couple of lectures, and I did code.  However, coding wasn't successfull enough.  I've approached problem 18 from Project Euler two times now, and both failed to supply me with the correct answer.

I'll continue to find the working algorithm for Project Euler problem, and hope to watch more lectures and read more material.

L. e. c. t. u. r. e. s...

Most of the week and throughout the weekend I was watching CS76 Harvard course lectures non-stop.  The Objective-C "picture" makes more sense each time I hit 'play' in QuickTime player.  I am definitely going to start actually implementing what I've learned so far during coding practice.  Right now I'm just trying to get myself started.

That's being said, I've never stopped coding.  As my practice in C++ I solve Project Euler problems (this week there were three of them, done mostly on Saturday).  And this process really affects my way of approaching tasks.  For example, I am covinced that it is absolutely necessary to use paper and pencil while figuring out algorithm and structure of future code.  More so, it is sometimes helpful to trace some pieces of code on paper.  I wonder if it's the same experience with iPad instead of paper and pencils, but something tells me that 'hard copy' may still be a must.

So, next week it's going to be lectures (I mean, more lectures), and hopefuly coding first Objective-C apps completely on my own, just like I can in C++.