This project is from iOS SDK Programming by Chris Adamson and Bill Dudney.
The start of the first twitter application. I just posts a canned message to your Twitter account. Version tag is v1.0.
Add a WebView pane and button to display my tweets to application. Book introduces @property and IBOutlet. Version tag is v2.0.
First step to add asynchronicity so posting are reloaded after submitting a post. We do this with blocks. Blocks in Objective-C are not much different than blocks in Smalltalk.
Hint: In the iPhone simulator be sure to setup Twitter account info. I forgot to do this and the app was not behaving. I would click on I finished the project button and nothing would happen. Lost about a hour figuring that one out.
Great bit of advice in Adamson and Dudney book:
we always want to finish our UI before we start localizing
This is because we are changing the UI components and you'll need to fix all the localizations at the same time. Better to wait until the UI is complete.
In this chapter we parse the JSON and handle the display ourselves. We ask for the user_timeline passing in the screen_name as a parameter. An example of the returning JSON returned from this request is on the Twitter API site. In this case the GET request looks like
https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=your_account_name
You can see the returned JSON by just putting this in your web browser. You might want to add &count=1 or &count=2 at the end of the URL.
When parsing the returned JSON we pick out just the created_at and text.
Getting back to the main thread in the application is done by using dispatch_async() with a queue and a block. The queue we want is the main queue that we get by using the function: dispatch_get_main_queue().
Interesting examples of KVC. One in replacing a block for sorting tweets using an array of sort descriptors (one or more). The other for accessing dictionary using valueForKeyPath: instead of valueForKey:, so you can access the name attribute with the string @"user.name".
Version tag is v3.0.
The Apple documentation on cocoa design patterns does not mention these patterns. I need to find better references than the ones below. The KVC one is okay.
- Xcode 4.2.1 or 4.3beta.
- Lion 10.7.2
- MacBook Pro 17in, Mid 2010
- iOS SDK Programming by Chris Adamson and Bill Dudney. This is an excellent book with uptodate iOS 5 examples. It uses ARC and storyboards by default. I am using the first beta version.
- iOS Programming, the Big Nerd Ranch Guide, 2nd Ed covers iOS 4 and their approach to development. There are some minor things I take exception with but overall this is an excellent book and looking forward to the 3rd edition.
- Xcode 4 videos FREE. These provide a great introduction to key and advanced features of Xcode 4.
- Objective-C Programming Pragmatic Programmer videos are a very good introduction.
- Programming in Objective-C 2.0, 2nd Edition by Stephen G. Kochan is a excellent reference but does not really cover the idoms and best practices.
- Git site has an documentation link that has tutorials to developer documentation as well as download the software. Xcode supports git. I use a combination of Xcode and SourceTree to manage my git repository. Most adds and commits are from inside Xcode. Merges, tagging, pushing to GitHub are from SourceTree. Of course I also make use of the command line (mainly for setup) and even some commands on GitHub itself.
- GitHub is the place to share your git repositories with others and the site has a very good set of help pages.
- Insider Guide to GitHub videos from Pragmatic Programmer are a bit dated but have some excellent tips. First video is free, second is just $5.
- SourceTree from Atlassian is FREE tool for managing source code and you can download at the Mac App Store. It works well with git and GitHub.
- Marked is a great tool for previewing Markdown for the
README.mdfile. It even has a GitHub stylesheet. - MultiMarkdown Composer is also a good tool for authoring any markdown file in the project. It helps you to remember the correct syntax.