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360 MacDev day two: a recap of the Denver nerd-fest
Saturday was the second and last day of 360 MacDev in Denver, and it was full of excellent topics from the world of Mac development. Although I was unable to stay for the last three speakers (my apologies, guys!), the morning and lunch sessions were very useful and educational. To start off the festivities were Dave Wiskus of Double Encore (the sharp-dressed man standing next to the conference poster with legs at right) and Kyle Richter of Dragon Forged Software with a talk titled "iOS: the Gateway Drug." Wiskus and Richter were thinking of possible Mac-related papers for the conference a while back when they got the idea of taking one of the Double Encore "Massively Overrated" iOS apps -- KeyGrinder (free) -- and porting it to Mac OS X and the Mac App Store. TUAW reviewed KeyGrinder earlier this year. KeyGrinder is a small app -- you get into the app, get a password hash, and then pop back out. The challenge was to turn this into something usable in OS X, so they decided to set the app up with a menu bar icon as a primary user interface element. Users would be able to drag a URL to that icon, then have the app open up with the URL pre-populated and password hash visible. Their usual modus operandi is to draw out ideas for the UI on paper, create a wireframe, then make a mockup and finally look at style guides for additional tweaks.
Xcode 3.2 Daily Tip: Adding actions and outlets in IB
More Xcode daily tips for Mac and iPhone developers. Back in the old times, when dinosaurs roamed the earth (and used less sophisticated IDEs), Interface Builder offered a built-in class browser as part of the project window. This browser allowed to you navigate through the Objective-C class hierarchy, and add subclasses along with instance variables and methods. You could generate files from those classes as a skeleton for further development. Then for a while, the class browser went away. And it was missed. But it is back again. New to Xcode 3.2, the Interface Builder Library pane hosts an updated class browser. This new subpane combines features that have recently been in the Class Identity Inspector (namely, adding outlets and actions to a class) with the ability to generate new subclasses from existing classes. So how does it work? I may be a brontosaurus but I prefer the old style browser to the new style "Lineage" display shown here. The new pane is certainly pretty, and it fits in well with the Library pane concept of collecting elements that are universally used throughout a project, but it lacks a certain ease-of-browsing that the old tree-style presentation used to give. All aesthetic and usability concerns aside, it's important to know that the Outlets/Actions interface has moved from its prior home into a new one. The interaction objects remain essentially unchanged. Use the + button to add outlets and actions, the - button to delete them. Double-click the default types to change them to a different class. You can locate a class by entering a string into the search field at the bottom of the pane. The pop-down action menu on the bottom-left offers a number of class-related functions including subclassing, displaying group banners in the class list, writing out updated class files, and more.
iPhone Dev 101: The "Hello World!" app
In the last iPhone Dev 101 post, I told you a little about creating your first project using Xcode; however, in this post, I want to show you how to create your first application that will run in the iPhone simulator. In honor of staying with the classic way of teaching programming, we'll create a "Hello World!" application as our first one. Creating the new projectIf you have installed the iPhone SDK/Xcode, then you can launch Xcode by navigating to /Developer/Applications. Once there, you can double click on the Xcode application (you may also find it handy to just drag the icon to the dock if you will be using it a lot). Once Xcode launches, click File > New Project. Under the iPhone OS section on the left side of the resulting window, select "Application." Select "View-based Application" from the templates that show up on the right side, and then click the "Choose" button. You will then be prompted to specify a project save name -- this will also be the name of your resulting application, so choose your project name wisely. You're project has now been created, and the Xcode window that is displayed will contain all of your code, resources, etc. There isn't much there now, but the application is fully functional at this point. You can click the "Build & Go" button in the toolbar, and the application will be compiled and launched in the iPhone Simulator. Again, this is a fully functional application, but it doesn't do anything useful at this point -- the usefulness of the app is up to your coding, but Apple supplies you with the base code and dependencies.
