Programming & The iPhone
Jan. 11th, 2010 06:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aWhen I came to Berkeley in 1989, I was leaning toward the law as a career. The internet and the vision of an interconnected world that lay ahead changed my mind, and so instead I ended up in computer programming. It was something that I'd been involved in for years already, since I used to program in BASIC and in Turbo-C on my old Heathkit computers. Now it was something that I was looking to turn into a career.
Just as Berkeley had changed me the first time, within four years Berkeley had changed my mind again. Thanks to the bureaucracies of a public university, multiplied by the bare ignorance of so many of the students (likely the ones who had just gone into computers for the money), the fact that the vast majority of the professors didn't actually give a damn about teaching undergrads, and the unfortunate obsolescence of the computer science program--which in 1989 was still teaching programmers to wire together electronics on bread boards and which really didn't touch upon OOP in the main curriculum--my interest in computer programming was largely extinguished. I ended up turning toward IT and technical writing instead when I left Berkeley.
Thanks, UCB.
It's been a long road back, but in the past several years I've been programming increasing amounts. For most of that time it's been Perl and PHP work, first at Skotos (where I largely rewrote one of our games and wrote a simple content-management system), then at RPGnet (where I've coded tons of stuff including somewhere around 50,000 lines of code/HTML for the Gaming Index).
The last two years have been even more active, with learning Objective-C, learning the iPhone SDK, writing a book about it, writing many, many articles on the topics, then finally writing a couple of complete apps, of increasing complexity.
The result has been very fulfilling. Much more than with the Perl & PHP work I can see the beauty of programming again, with elegant libraries of objects working together with each other in harmony, while still offering up reproducible code that can be carried for project to project.
Twenty years after I started at Berkeley, I'm enjoying programming more than I did any time in that interim.
Thanks, Apple. And Skotos.
So I finished up the gold release of Reiner Knizia's Money last Wednesday and sent it to Apple. Though we've released an RPG app already, this is our first full game, based of course on Knizia's card game of the same name.
If you've heard horror stories about Apple's rejection of apps, they're entirely overblown. They always have been. The squeaky wheel gets all the blogosphere attention, or something like that. When I submitted the app, their queue stated that 99% of apps were currently approved within 14 days. It took almost exactly 48 hours for Money to be approved.
It actually hasn't been released yet, as I requested a release date of a week from Wednesday, so that I could correlate some articles with it. I'll post here when it's out, for anyone interested.
Just as Berkeley had changed me the first time, within four years Berkeley had changed my mind again. Thanks to the bureaucracies of a public university, multiplied by the bare ignorance of so many of the students (likely the ones who had just gone into computers for the money), the fact that the vast majority of the professors didn't actually give a damn about teaching undergrads, and the unfortunate obsolescence of the computer science program--which in 1989 was still teaching programmers to wire together electronics on bread boards and which really didn't touch upon OOP in the main curriculum--my interest in computer programming was largely extinguished. I ended up turning toward IT and technical writing instead when I left Berkeley.
Thanks, UCB.
It's been a long road back, but in the past several years I've been programming increasing amounts. For most of that time it's been Perl and PHP work, first at Skotos (where I largely rewrote one of our games and wrote a simple content-management system), then at RPGnet (where I've coded tons of stuff including somewhere around 50,000 lines of code/HTML for the Gaming Index).
The last two years have been even more active, with learning Objective-C, learning the iPhone SDK, writing a book about it, writing many, many articles on the topics, then finally writing a couple of complete apps, of increasing complexity.
The result has been very fulfilling. Much more than with the Perl & PHP work I can see the beauty of programming again, with elegant libraries of objects working together with each other in harmony, while still offering up reproducible code that can be carried for project to project.
Twenty years after I started at Berkeley, I'm enjoying programming more than I did any time in that interim.
Thanks, Apple. And Skotos.
So I finished up the gold release of Reiner Knizia's Money last Wednesday and sent it to Apple. Though we've released an RPG app already, this is our first full game, based of course on Knizia's card game of the same name.
If you've heard horror stories about Apple's rejection of apps, they're entirely overblown. They always have been. The squeaky wheel gets all the blogosphere attention, or something like that. When I submitted the app, their queue stated that 99% of apps were currently approved within 14 days. It took almost exactly 48 hours for Money to be approved.
It actually hasn't been released yet, as I requested a release date of a week from Wednesday, so that I could correlate some articles with it. I'll post here when it's out, for anyone interested.