Distant Suns

So now you know a little about the toolset and the language Objective-C. Trouble is, that is just the beginning. It is as if you have a hammer, a saw, the book “House Building for Dummies,” and maybe even an idea of what you want the final house to look like, while facing an empty lot. And as Robert Redford’s character said at the end of the film, The Candidate upon winning a hotly contested election: “Now what?”

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Another in a very occasional series of columns covering the craft of programming and what it takes to create one of those app things.

Even though this article is about computer languages it is not meant at all to teach one how to “speak” in any of these languages, for that is light-years beyond the scope of this article.

A computer program is likened to a recipe. A recipe with potentially millions of steps that could come crashing down in a smoldering heap of code if as much as one of those steps is in the wrong order.  The recipe might tell the system that if the user does something, then load in an image, draw it to the screen in green, rotate three times, do the hokey-pokey and fade it out. And that might be just one little task of thousands in a complex web of tasks, actions and behaviors.

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Sorry for the long delay since the previous column. Something called an ‘iPad’ I think, came out last week and I was in a rush to have something in the store on day 1.

This column is to either help software neophytes get going on their own great app ideas, or to at least illustrate the process for the curious.

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When I reserved my iPad, I selected Apple’s flagship store in Palo Alto for pickup. I had never quite understood the Apple line mentality. After all, most people could just save a lot of time and either order one online or wait a day or two.

Now I see the light.

Plus I absolutely needed to get a unit ASAP to test my software, Distant Suns. It was already live in the App Store and had over 80 downloads, so I needed to see what others were to make any fixes for things the simulator didn’t show.

I got there at about 7. Already one news van was parked across the street and about 150 people were in line. The reserved line was the shorter of the two, with maybe 50 or so.

Everyone seemed to recognize the silliness of it all, but also just how fun it was to hang out with fellow Apple fans. The store employees were top notch, handing Krispy Kreme doughnuts and coffee.

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Okay, okay, so why yet another column on beginning iPhone programming when the net is gravid with similar articles?

Well, when I was asked to start a semi-irregular column by the kind folks at www.iPhonenes.com the general topic would be from an app author’s point of view. So I really need to start at the very beginning (from which I understand is a very good place to start).

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