Back to Uni
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2012-01-26 22:47:11 - Graham Ellis
We're trainers so we should be (and we are) advocates of training courses. And that means attending appropriate training, as well as giving it. Those readers who've been on our courses may well have heard me talk about how I have traveled far and wide to learn from the people at the heart of Perl, PHP, Python and more - traveling to places as far apart as Alaska, Colorado, Venice and Izmir in the process. And on the less technical side, you'll know I completed an Emergency First Aid course last week.I'm studying again at present - not locally, but not at one of the more exotic locations - I'm back at the University where I took my degree course, graduating some 36 years ago. It's rather an odd feeling. I'm learning a new operating system - ios - and specifically programming under it. That will get me much more up to speed on iPad and iPhone programming. The course is spread over 10 evenings over as many weeks, and from my first attendance today I know it's very much lecture style, with the tutor covering a huge amount of ground in 2 hours, and all his students needing to find time before the following week to revise, practise, and come up with questions for the following week.
Why this departure from server side programming? Because the world is wider than server side programming. And it turns out that, hidden under the layers of apple and pastry, is a container that's based on a GUI (Graphic User Interface) with much the same concepts as Tk, and a language in Objective C that's object oriented just as C++ or Python, with a widget interface that's reminiscent of Swing (Java) or wX [Python]. And with some bits of the language, I'm thinking "goodness - that's almost like Tcl or Lua".The best way for me to learn is for me to write notes - "what if I was telling someone else how to do this" - and that's what I'm planning to do. And I'll be hoping to go deep enough to be able to answer corollaries such as "what have I missed / why didn't it work" and "how do I xxx" where xxx is something a bit different. You'll see the fruits of my learning in a few months, I expect. We have a couple of iPad applications in mind, and one of the things that I've already learned today is that with care you can write an application for both the iPhone and the iPad. The two headlines to bear in mind are (1) the different aspect ratio and (2) if you build the two as one, you can't sell them twice to someone who wants them for both device types, nor have a differential pricing scheme. Well - that's what we were told. I'm going to suggest that screen size makes a significant difference too. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been tailoring web content for iPhone and iPad - and that's something that I've already learned to be very significant.
It rather looks like this isn't the big departure for us that you might have imagined. Rather a gentle introduction of a new track. Objective C's actually a rather nice language ...