Graham Hayes's blog

Updating from iOS 6 to iOS 7

I've lately been developing one app which is ready to go and looking great, but I won't be uploading it until iOS 7 is released to the public on Wednesday. In the meantime I've been updating my current catalog of apps to iOS 7.

It's been quite interesting to go through my old code and see how my coding has developed over the last year and a half.

More than any other update I'm much keener for my apps to be iOS 7 only and I will be keenly looking to see the adoption rates for iOS users. Supporting earlier iOS versions is now more awkward and for the purposes of simplifying it's certainly undesirable.

Speaking of simplification, in the near future Amiga Clock Lite is going to be killed, and Amiga Clock will be a free, ad supported and fully featured. The free version has had approximately 2000 downloads and the paid 15. I feel there is no real reason to support two versions.

I haven't decided if I should leave it but inform users to download the new version using the same in app prompt, or just delete it and be done. I think two free versions of the same app will be confusing to customers.

New App First Look

After a somewhat intense time at work I'm now at a more relaxed schedule and so I've starting writing apps again. This is the first look at my current one. It is currently unnamed, but I intend this to be quite an ambitious project for me.

At the moment as you can see there are a few placeholder graphics. Doing graphics is my least favourite part of the process so it usually gets pushed back to the end.

This app. like my previous apps, is intended to be as simple as possible with minimal fluff. The app itself is a combination of a to do list and an interval timer.  The rational for this type of app firstly comes from how I like to work, espescially when I'm in a procrastinating mood! When I was a student I used to take my assignments and spend twenty minutes going into each one, with a ten minute coffee or internet break inbetween. Once I had gone through all the assignments I was itching to get into solving any difficulties I encountered, procrastination smashed!

The beauty of this approach is you can always trick yourself into doing just twenty minutes. For all but the most trivial tasks twenty minutes will let you build up some momentum but you won't really get too far into the task. In fact when twenty minutes is up the temptation will often be there to keep going, which is good it means the intervals are working, but you must stop, rest, and go on to the next task. 

 

If you do resist the temptation to break the intervals and go through all your tasks, then you will have spent a quality twenty minutes with each of the things on your to do list including the stuff you're dreading or bored by. After you've completed it you can do what you want next, but hopefully your motivation to smash through your to do list will be high by now!

A popular technique coming in to the mainstream is the Pomodoro Technique which is very similar to how I used to work. In this one you choose only one task to focus on then you focus on it for 25 minutes, you then take 5 minutes off and repeat, after your fourth interval working you take a longer rest from 15 to 25 minutes. There are apps that are made for this technique already, my app will have shortcuts for both this and my favourite interval program.

There isn't a lot of coding left to do, the majority of whats left is graphics work. In this app I want to experiment with social media, offering rewards for sharing my app. It's a new direction for me, but it should be informative if anything.

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My First App - How Flashcards Should Be

I had in mind from the beginning what my first app would be, a simple flashcard program that lets you make cards with text, sound and pictures. Apps like this already exist but I wanted something with less features. Basically a step up from actual cards.

The reason for this is flashcards are not an important part of learning anything, they're good for familiarisation, revision and quickly learning a small set of knowledge. An app with a myriad of features distract from that, they make flashcards a bigger part of your life than they should be.

A popular feature is being able to download sets of flashcards from a repository like quizlet.com, it sounds great, you can save time by downloading hundreds of cards without having to spend time creating them.

Let's now look at the reality, what is the chance that someone has made a set of cards where every card is just what you need to learn right now, it's not going to happen. You will find either they have stuff you already know, stuff you don't need to know yet, with some of what you should be learning now.

Instead people end up downloading random mish mashes of cards some of which will have the same questions as other sets, and then as if they feel the need to balance out the time they saved not creating those cards, people will spend hours learning these cards and keeping track of meaningless statistics, like how many cards they've mastered according to the app.

Another misuse of flashcards is when people also decide 'oh! I think I'll learn kanji' and get a flashcard app with the 2000 most frequent characters and begin. In their defence they do need to learn the 2000 kanji but not all of them now and not in the order that they've been written.

Here's another way, start reading. That's why you are learning kanji in the first place, if you can't read a kanji skip it or look it up, but lean toward skipping it. If it comes up again start leaning toward looking it up. If you've looked it up a couple times now and it's not sticking then start leaning toward making a flashcard. That's possibly four exposures minimum, before you resort to flashcards. Now you've learned that kanji and can read it every time. Delete that flashcard, you don't need it anymore, it's now inhaling your time and attention which could be spent reading more.

Anyway this is the motivation for this style of flashcard app, I hope people understand it and come to value it, but the original intended audience is me and for me it is exactly what I wanted.  

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Back To Programming - Leaning The iOS SDK

 

 

 

I recently purchased an iMac so I could start programming for iOS systems. From ages 12 to 23 programming was an obsession. Academia killed it for me, but six years later the bug is back.

As soon as I got my iMac up and running I downloaded the iOS SDK and enrolled in to the developer program. Then I downloaded a couple books from the Kindle store and got to it. Firstly I was apprehensive about using Kindle books to learn programming but in the end it wasn't an issue. They do tend to wrap long lines of code but if you know what you are reading then it's fine.

What I didn't expect was the large difference between iOS 5 and previous versions, or at least my inability to deal with it. The first book I bought was iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide(affiliate link). This book is really well written, the concepts are explained brilliantly and the examples are worth doing and complex enough that you are almost writing full applications. The only problem, is that it's already out of date. I struggled my way through the first three examples before I'd had enough.

Now I'm familiar with the SDK I could probably go back to it and have an easier time making their examples work for iOS 5, but there's not much point now. (You can download a template so that their examples work as written for newer versions of iOS and Xcode).

So I got a different book, iPhone iOS 5 Development Essentials (affiliate link), this book is for iOS 5 and nearly all the examples work out of the box, this book starts with a lot of filler that you can skip unless you've never seen an iPhone before (in which case why are you trying to program for it?...Well?). The examples are good, they adequately explain and demonstrate the functionality of the different elements in the SDK but they are overly simple.

They literally give you enough knowledge to get the individual components to work but leave extending that knowledge up to you. Integrating a few of the chapters in to building a more complex app would have made it a more interesting and useful book. This would have reinforced the Model View Controller pattern and also brought out a lot of issues that you will come across when you make a proper application.

The Big Nerd Ranch book actually has this, over the course of several chapters they take you through making an app which integrates a lot of practical components of the iOS SDK and flicking through these chapters has been really useful for me progressing from the basic level that iPhone Essentials has given me.

This was a pretty quick and dirty way to get me up and running with iOS development. I did about 60% of the examples from iPhone Essentials and started making my first app which is nearly finished and ready for submission. Now I'm moving toward improving my coding style so my apps are more manageable for future updates. 

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