a proper iPhone client
a proper iPhone client
I had a few semi-successful attempts at creating something for the iPhone, but it was basically just hacking and hardcoding into some example projects from Apple. A few days ago I finally got my head round the idea of programming interfaces in iOS and boy, what a blast it is! In a way it is so much cooler than programming desktop apps, the way the API works makes it so natural to close all the holes and polish the every bit of it so it is as perfect as possible. I think it is not too bad that I waited for such a long time to finally do it, it is so much easier when you’re already familiar with the Cocoa programming. You can also immediately notice small little differences and improvements in the API design that iOS SDK has over Cocoa, but mostly it is the same good old stuff. It also helped that my main engine and client - server interfaces are quite mature now, and I could focus on doing the user interface rather than fighting the nitty gritty internals. And BTW, the new iPhone 4’s screen just blows everything I’ve seen out of the water, it truly is magical (As in, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic).
Anyways, the client at the moment will let you browse through the tree (Locations / Actions / Probes / Paths) and will display detailed information per node type, and you can add Actions to Favourites and Probes to Overview for quick access. Nothing too exciting yet, but it was just a few days and it’s all working nicely and in a way it is more robust than the same functions accessed from the Mac client. I remember the Apple keynote on which they released the iPhone APIs and were showing off various apps created in supposedly 2 weeks - and I can now believe they were not lying (but I still bet that most of the code was reused from existing apps and those developers were experienced Cocoa guys).
Check the screenshots here.
Friday, 24 September 2010