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 iPhone apps 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.

Old Post about Old Code

This post was published over twelve years ago. I haven’t opened up Xcode in a long time. Most of the code I write nowadays is T-SQL, but I recently completed another certification, this time in Python for Finance, so that might be of interest to you rather than my previous adventures in iPhone programming.

Setting up your development environment for iPhone Programming

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. I was an Objective-C developer in a previous millennium, but lately I mainly get pressed into duty writing JavaScript, ColdFusion, or 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.

I did eventually do a scrum certification, can’t say it helped me get a job.

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 are 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.

Demo of old iPhone code

Blocker is another clone of Arkanoid, the author of the book “Beginning iPhone Game Development” which is no longer in print or on the publisher’s website. I chose to get it running again, as one of the projects from the book that I built years ago. I also 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 and now AI coding agents. 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.

Debugging

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.

If you made it this far and want to leave a comment about iPhone programming spammers apparently have not forced me to closed comments on this post.

This entry was originaly posted on September 11th, 2014, it was last edited on May 1st, 2026 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: iPhone, Objective-C, Programming.