Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Learning from Lab 1 in Mac OS and iPhone development

Just finished my Lab 1 for Peter's Mac class and I want to keep track of the little bumps along the way.

Things I learned:

  1. If you want the keyboard to hide after you are finished inputting text into a field - basically once the field loses focus you need to do this:
    [txtControl resignFirstResponder];
    thanks to iCodeBlog for that one. That site also has the best tutorial that I could find for getting started on iPhone apps.

  2. It's much easier to do a View-based application with the iPhone SDK template, but this means you have fewer UI objects to play with. I still have not figured out why this is. In the regular application template there is a wide variety of inputs, pickers, etc. But in that template you have to create custom views and though I read up on this a bit, it seemed like overkill for Lab 1.

  3. Looking at the existing apps in the iTunes store is a good way to see what UI designs are working already in the real world. I like to think I'm pretty good at laying out apps, but it's amazing how much better they can be and it's very helpful to look at what people are doing in the store since they have probably gotten a lot more feedback on their UI.


The amount of information out there about iPhone code, especially for beginners is really sparse still. It seems like every time I google about an issue I'm hitting the same few blogs/sites. I'll post the code for my apps when the due date has passed so that there's just a little more out there. Remind me if I forget.

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