*theDesignersPerspective

iOSBootCamp : BigNerdRanch { int 4 }

Morning Mist

Brain hurts. Crashed hard after dinner. Woke up around 1:30am and continued to study about variables and delegates. Lot’s of reading, not a lot of understanding. Considering that programming seems to be mostly about spatial concepts and behaviors, it’s surprising to me that animation hasn’t been leveraged as a teaching aid. Both teachers so far have used extensive amounts of arm waving to explain how the code is working. Also, the diagrams I’ve seen so far are both aesthetically displeasing, and somewhat lacking in description. Or maybe this shit is just hard.

Cranked through a bunch of exercises today where we read a few paragraphs of text from the book and then copy code to Xcode. Like cooking from a cookbook. Resulting in lil example apps that we build on the iPhone. The purpose is to get us familiar with the different controls provided by foundation kit. In theory, we are supposed to know enough Obj-C syntax from the first two days we spent covering it. So the words I am reading are supposed to have meaning. But I found myself falling behind, spending a lot of time forcing myself to grok something before moving forward. By the second exercise, I realized this technique was not effective. So I started glossing over the text, just looking for the instructions/recipe to get the code into Xcode. I spent the rest of the day doing this. Not really paying too much attention to how it all works. This is really hard for me to do, because I am a control freak. But the output -app running on iPhone with code I typed in- is feeding me positive reinforcement. At the end of the day, I started to pay more attention to what I was doing. It’s all still really blurry, but I am starting to identify higher contrasting areas, and I’m getting more familiar with Xcode.

The beacon of light is dancing through the night mist in the distance. Full sail ahead. Almost there. Oooooooh shiny, siren songs. Crash into the rocks. Bitches…