iPhone Programming

Today I finally put in a couple hours getting Xcode up to date plus both old and new code running in the iOS Simulator. I’ve continued to have trouble finding a job, so even though it probably won’t help me find a job, I’ve resumed coding in Objective-C just to see if I still know how. I ordered the book “Learn cocos2d 2” quite a while back but never had the time to read it and work through the projects until now.

Before you can build your first iPhone game or at least your first iPhone game in a long while, you have to update your development environment. That is one of the few advantages to doing web work, all you really need is a text editor, a browser, and I guess a properly configured server with say PHP and MySQL on it. I was an Objective-C developer in a previous millennium, but lately I mainly get pressed into duty writing JavaScript, ColdFusion, or even PHP. I’m no longer a professional software developer, I’m an unemployed former professional software developer who apparently should be reading about unity3d, scrum, and leadership based on how my last job interview turned out.

However I actually buy books with the intention of reading them, sometimes it takes me a year or two to get to a book, sometimes I even put a book down and don’t get back to it, but generally most books I buy, I read, even if they hard. cocos2d 2 has perhaps fallen out of favour with ever newer and more exciting tools being available to the iPhone and cross-platform developer, but I was an Objective-C developer professionally, so I plan to work through this book before going on to another book on Excel which has sat on a shelf for many months unread.

In addition to downloading the right version of Kobold2D, I decided to see if I could get old projects to run. Last time I tried to run my apps iOS had just released a major update or Xcode had and the author of Kobold2D hadn’t got everything patched. Now another big update should be available for Xcode and other libraries so once I got one old game running I recorded another video, mainly because the game’s soundtrack amused me.

Blocker is another clone of Arkanoid, the author of the book “Beginning iPhone Game Development” chose it as one of the projects in his book and I built it years ago. I got Peeved Penguins running again too. This time I recorded the gameplay video with sound. Sound makes a big difference to a game. Before I could get everything to work I had to relearn how to ‘Clean’ an app, in ProjectBuilder it was a build target, that isn’t how things are done now. Nowadays developers don’t know how good they have it with their IDEs, Google, and StackOverflow. I learned to program on a text editor from a book. We were lucky if we had a mouse. I still remember keyboard shortcuts for text editors I haven’t used in years.

You need patience for things to build and you have to look up the odd strange error message, but it’ll be nice to have a debugger. I learned to program without a debugger too. So I tend to fall back on printfs when initially debugging a problem, especially simple web stuff, but I remember last time I coded in Objective-C I used the debugging tools, so I’ll have to remember to use them when I get stuck and a simple Google search doesn’t reveal the answer. I might just have to get some sort of programming job, people always have strange proposals whenever they want me to code. You’d think I wouldn’t have so much trouble convincing people to hire me, but I do.

This entry was originaly posted on September 11th, 2014, it was last edited on January 14th, 2019 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Cocos2d, iPhone, Objective-C, Software Development.