Coding More and More...

It's definitely a quality shift happening during this week regarding my C++ studies.  I was reading and watching lectures for a pretty long while, and did much less coding.  This week it's definitely all about exercises and practice!

I actually prefer it to be this way, coding in XCode is relaxing and pleasant experience, I'd even say I enjoy it a lot!  Also that Textastic app on my iPad for 'on-the-go' programming helps me to stay focused on a problem during my commute or when I have a small window of free time.  I do rough prototyping on iPad as well (I use Notes+ for that purpose, and it works really well;  however there are many great solutions out there!).

There is an important difference in coding in XCode and in Textastic, which I'd like to bring about this time.  In the XCode it's very easy to track a bug or a typo, highlighted variables are easier to identify too, and of course you can just compile and see if the result is the one you want right away.  This makes me less cautious about misspelling and typing in general.  It also tends to soften my logics, or do less thinking about the algorithm.

Textastic does C++ highlighting, but it is limited to standard functions of the language and doesn't include variables.  This makes it quite tricky to write a working program from the scratch.  And you cannot actually debug it, since there is no way to do it on the iPad by any means.  This all makes me to pay more attention to implementation of my logics, to do more preparations (sketching out the algorithm, or as I call it prototyping), be carefull about spelling, etc.  For many people this would mean that it is completely useless waste of time to do this 'on-the-go' programming.  But I also know that it will be very easy for me to debug my program later in XCode, so I tend to use up as much time as possible to code using Textastic, and I am sure it not only saved me time, but also increased my learning speed and quality of the study.

And speaking of Textastic (yes, I do like this app a lot, really great and thoughtout piece of software) it's going to be updated very soon, hopefully in a couple of days with many more useful features (Cyrillic code page support, just to name one which is quite nice for me to have now), and I am very excited to see it!

Coding On-The-Go!

This week was mainly a "watching" week.  I did less coding than usual, but continued watching the lectures.  This time I got myself ready for some practice with arrays.  I've also decided to code only select exercises from the book, not all of them.  However, I will do at least half of all the tasks from the chapter.

I've also noticed that it takes up to an hour and a half each day for me to travel by train to and from my day-time job.  During that time I usually play some games or get online from my phone, or something else, not too much time-consuming.  I also carry my iPad with me quite often, and it was always tempting to find some way to do my programming on-the-go, while in traveling.  Many possible solutions came to my mind, but the only working and convenient for me became Textastic for iPad, which is a text-processor designed for typing code.  It provides decent functionality (syntax highlighting, tabulation, quick punctuation keys, etc), and it syncs to FTP, Dropbox, or via browser in clear and simple ways.  And there are lots of supported languages for syntax highlighting, including Java.  Of course there is no way to run the code right from the app, but that's not an urgent need (besides the fact that Apple won't allow something like that on the iPad).

The app currently is $9.99 on the iTunes AppStore, and I know that the price could go down, but I just wanted to support the developer in full and not to wait for some unknown time.  I am very pleased with Textastic and find it to be a very nice productivity tool for any programmer on-the-go.