Blog
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Tim Stephens
iPhone Programming Class by The Pragmatic Studio
July 19th, 2010
Class begins tomorrow in Reston, VA. I’m taking the iPhone/iPad Programming with Matt Drance and Daniel Steinberg by The Pragmatic Studio. I’m excited to the point of being giddy about going.
I’ve spent the last week and a half trying to bring myself up to being capable of following along with the class on the first day. All of my years of Web application programming and the dozen scripting languages I’ve touched over the years did not prepare me for Objective-C. This is different. Harder? More complex? Probably, but I don’t know enough about it yet to answer those questions 
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I picked up two books from The Pragmatic Bookshelf to get a leg up. While I’m not all the way through them, I can confidently say that they have been helpful:
- Beginning Mac Programming: Develop with Objective-C and Cocoa by Tim Isted
- iPhone SDK Development by Bill Dudney and Chris Adamson
I’ll let you know how it goes.
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One Response 
Day one is over and wow did we go over a lot. This class is already taking a different approach than the books I’ve read. This should come as no surprise – Matt and Daniel are much more instructive than a book.
I’m not going to get into all the stuff we learned today, but I will tell you about two little nuggets that I learned about:
1. Gestures in Xcode – a three finger swipe up or down will change what file you are editing. Nothing earth-shattering, but quite a nice shortcut for switching files. First time I’ve thought about getting a Magic Mouse.
2. Edit > Refactor menu in Xcode – I know I come from the ‘simple’ world of HTML/CSS/JavaScript IDEs, but Xcode has some amazing features. One of them is the ability to help you refactor your code. Just one example:
* select some code in Xcode
* choose Edit > Refactor from the menu
* Xcode will transform it into a method or function
* Xcode will show you the changes to the file or files (built in Diff tool)
* and you can choose wether to allow Xcode to refactor your code or not
* if you do, Xcode takes a snapshot of what your code was before the refactor – so you can roll back
Why don’t my JavaScript editors do this? Are there even JS IDEs that have this capability?