Lately I’ve been doing work on a php site. It’s my first big php site and I am really enjoying it. It doesn’t bother me that I’ve never done any php on this scope before though because of something I’ve been learning recently.
I am a capable of being a successful programmer.
I’ve been working through the SQL iPhone Tutorials at iCodeBlog.com and I’ve just recently finished them. I now have a working ToDo application that I plan on modifying or using code snippets from to create an app I have an idea for. iPhone programming is definitely a different experience. I’m glad that I finally found some idea that interests me, now I need to see if it is doable.
Today I am working on a mini review of a game called Tradewinds Odyssey for a potential job as a game tester. What programmer or geek in general doesn’t want to get paid to sit in their own home testing games and writing about it?
What follows is my actual review of the game and my short experience with it.
I have been working on learning to code for the iPhone and it is an interesting and challenging experience.
I have been primarily a .Net Developer for my entire career. I have worked with C-Based languages, but mainly that was c#, which is quite advanced as far as C-Based languages go.
What I am finding the most difficult though are the things that feel a tad archaic to me. For example, nearly every language I’ve ever worked with used the period key “.” to access methods and properties of an object. It’s very strange for me have to access those items by placing the item within a set of brackets.
For those that aren’t aware, in c# where you might type something like:
in Objective-C it would be:
That isn’t the only place where Objective-C feels strange though. For one thing, the language is so descriptive that it makes me feel uncomfortable at times with how much information I’m seeing in method and property names. For example: numberOfRowsInSection, viewDidLoad, viewDidUnload, didReceiveMemoryWarning and more.
Something about the way that Objective-C deals with naming conventions feels right, but so different from what I’m used to seeing. Maybe I just haven’t been seeing properly written code before this. Who knows.
The biggest hurdle though?
Pointers.
Apparently I come from a cushy programming world where memory management is handled for me. I understand memory management (if you aren’t using it anymore, get rid of it) but I am not quite sure where all the pitfalls of pointers are quite yet, nor what all the syntax to do with them means. I NEED to understand WHY things happen before I fully understand what I’m doing.
I’m currently working on the excellent series of iPhone tutorials over at iCodeBlog.com. I highly recommend them.
I am in the process of setting up my blogging environment. Part of that environment is TextMate.
I’m a huge fan of TextMate, it’s one of the only apps that I’ve ever been glad I’ve paid for. It’s not an IDE per se, but I find that my productivity just increases when I use it. There are free versions of software similar to TextMate, but none of them have ever worked quite right for me. TextMate is just so easy to modify and change to my specific needs and is so bloat-free that there just aren’t too many distractions.
I find that TextMate fits all of my programming needs. Every single language I have ever tried to work in, I have used TextMate for. Everything from Ruby on Rails, PHP, C#, ASP.Net, VB.Net, HTML, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, Java and more.
I am even making this post straight from TextMate.
I am a keyboard oriented programmer. The less I have to take my hands of the keyboard the better. With TextMate I can be inside of any file and hit Alt+Ctrl+Cmd+B (my own shortcut) and create a new blog post. After I finish writing it, I hit Ctrl+Cmd+P and it publishes straight to my blog.
How easy is that?
I recommend any programmers out there with a Mac, fork over the cash for TextMate. The programmer of it, Allan Odgaard seems like a great guy and has been working on TextMate 2 on his own for a while now, but has promised that all of those who purchased TextMate 1 would receive TextMate 2 for free.
Every good programmer starts with “Hello World”, so I figured “Hello World” is a good place to start my blog as well.