T-54 Minor work done today, but it's still progress

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I managed to get in a little coding tonight, less than an hour, but still useful.

Day T-54 Accomplishments (Tuesday, February 16, 2010)

  • Added two methods to the movement handler class
  • Added unit tests for those methods as well

T-55 Pleased with what I was able to get working today

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I was able to spend several hours coding today and really enjoyed it.

I had left a few classes in a broken state last week, but got them cleaned back up and working correctly. Building on that, I added several new classes and test cases and would like to add some more, but I can sense it’s time to quit for the evening.

The only real problem I had today was that I seem to have messed up my configuration for the GHUnit GUI test runner. The test cases all run correctly in the command line version, but something in my project changed, and I’m not sure what — I posted a message to the GHUnit google group, hoping for a pointer in the right direction. Not a big deal for the moment, the only thing that really bothers me about it is that it points out there are still too many things about Xcode project configuration I don’t quite grok yet.

I still have a lot to do this week to get something useful to hand to someone else, but I am pleased with my progress today.

Day T-55 Accomplishments (Monday, February 15, 2010)

  • Fixed some classes I left broken last week
  • Added several classes and test cases to support them

T-56 Time for a course and schedule check

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I’m a little bit past a 30 day review so this will be more like a five week review. It was a profitable week for my consulting work, but also consumed much more of my time and emotional energy than I had anticipated. My consulting work week coming up will be full, but hopefully not overflowing as much as this past one.

Initial commitments and goals

My commitment on day T-90 was to have my first app in the store before 360iDev begins, which included the following:

  1. spend at least one hour advancing the state of my app (designing, coding, thinking, marketing, something)
  2. report on my activity via twitter with the hashtags #90days #360idev
  3. summarize my progress (or lack thereof) here: https://sunetos.com/tags/90days

My very rough outline for the first five weeks was:

  • Week 1: brainstorming ideas, planning, play with ideas
  • Week 2: develop enough of a prototype to begin getting feedback from others
  • Week 3-5: iterate through prototypes, expanding feedback circle

How I did

My progress to date along with my satisfaction level on a scale from zero to ten:

  • (6/10) Time: Spent at least an hour on my project for 28 out of last 35 days, not as much as I had hoped, but a couple of those days were close to a full work day
  • (9/10) Accountability: I have reported via web posts and twitter on a daily basis with the exception of the last two days — I’m not sure anyone reads it, but it has helped to keep me more focused
  • (8/10) Idea: I have a solid idea I am pursuing, even to the point of postponing what seemed like some other good ideas for the moment
  • (6/10) Prototyping: I have prototyped enough game behavior to be satisfied that it is worth pursuing, but I would like to be farther along
  • (1/10) Feedback: I barely have enough to show others right now, and thus have received very little feedback from them yet

Overall, I am still excited about the idea and believe that I have enough skill and time to make better progress over the next two weeks. My goal for this week is to have a minimally playable game that a few others can try, and then for the next week to begin working on some real graphic elements for the game.

Day T-56 Accomplishments (Sunday, February 14, 2010)

  • Evaluated progress against original commitments and goals
  • Mapped out goals for next two weeks

T-57 A refreshing completely non-work day

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A good day, other than reading the comics on the web Saturday, completely left my laptop alone for the day. Spent time putzing with one of my college sons, then had pizza with both college sons, my daughter, and wife, and enjoyed a college basketball game.

Day T-57 Accomplishments (Saturday, February 13, 2010)

  • Purposefully ignored all computer work and thinking all day to recharge

T-58 No iPhone work today, completely drained by the week's work

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This past week was productive for me on my consulting work, but left me little clock time for iPhone work, and now at the end of Friday has left me with very little emotional or mental energy to do more than vegetate this evening.

Day T-58 Accomplishments (Friday, February 12, 2010)

  • Zilch

T-59 No iPhone development, thinking, or even playing done today

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All work and no play makes me a dull boy, so I guess it’s been a dull day. Fortunately, a productive, though extremely long one on my “day job”.

Day T-59 Accomplishments (Thursday, February 11, 2010)

  • Nada

T-60 Managed to squeeze in some time to think through some smaller issues today

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I am one third of the way through my 90 day project, and it is probably time to take a look at my original and modified goals again–but today is not that day. I did not have enough uninterrupted time today to do that level of thinking or even get into Xcode.

But, in between running test suites, checking results, and fixing bugs I did manage to do a little bit of thinking about some user actions and what gets displayed on the screen.

When doing a longer touch series on the iPhone, I noticed that it was not too hard to get ahead of the “touchesMoved” process. The result is that when I do something simple like draw a line between those move points, I see that for moderate to fast movements, the curved lines my fingers drew was pretty jerky. I did a little bit of googling, some scribbling, and some thinking about how to overcome that visually. The precision of the events is plenty good enough for the game engine, I just want to make sure the displayed version of what the user is doing looks better.

Day T-60 Accomplishments (Wednesday, February 10, 2010)

  • Thought through what I would like to happen when a fast set of touchesMoved events is fired

T-61 No iPhone development tonight, plan is to double down on Wednesday

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Tuesday must be my day for being extra productive or overcommitted on other tasks. I will not be able to take time to work on iPhone stuff today, but I’m hoping to get this test release out the door this evening so I can double down on iPhone stuff on Wednesday.

Day T-61 Accomplishments (Tuesday, February 9, 2010)

  • No iPhone accomplishments, but my client project work went well today

T-62 I now have enough of an app to begin evaluating "fun-ness" of idea

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I spent less time on my app tonight, but have more information from this session — feels like I’m finally seeing some traction from my work the last week or two.

Unit tests are great — takes away my worries about breaking something while I play. I could use some more tests for existing behavior, but I have enough to be reasonably comfortable at this stage. I now have enough infrastructure in place that as I add more behavior, I can add tests as I go.

I have a very simple black and white OpenGL view running that is giving me some feedback, but I think I need to implement one more piece of my design to get a better idea. So far, so good. I am reasonably satisfied with where the game play is heading, but there is tons left to do.

Day T-62 Accomplishments (Monday, February 8, 2010)

  • Found and fixed errors discovered from unit tests added yesterday
  • Added more detailed tests, found some edge cases that needed to be fixed and fixed them as well
  • Tweaked some configuration parameters to try different variants of input styles

T-63 Xcode configuration 1, me 0 — but I have a rudimentary working GUI

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I spent (wasted?) an hour or so this afternoon trying to figure out what I did to mess up my Xcode project, but gave up and punted.

I started today with a working configuration with a separate target for the GHUnit test suite app. I added some more tests for an error I had caught last night, made what I thought were a few minor changes, but evidently changed something in the target configuration. The end result was that no matter what I did, I could not get the GHUnit test suite app to run. Unfortunately, I had made enough changes to my code and test cases without doing ‘git commit’ that I decided making a new project might be faster than rolling back to the last commited version. (It was)

I decided I didn’t understand enough about the interdependencies of Xcode configuration parameters, and started with a clean project, added the GHUnit pieces to it and had a working, simple project with two targets that behaved properly. I then copied my existing code into the new project, built, and things ran as I expected. I wish I knew what I did wrong earlier, because I am likely to do it again.

On the bright side, I have a simple version of my OpenGL view running using data from my game engine — which clearly showed an error I had not caught earlier. Those were the test cases I was building when I messed up my project.

Day T-63 Accomplishments (Sunday, February 7, 2010)

  • Reinforced something I should have remembered: It is very wise to make frequent, small commits
  • Learned that I know less about Xcode configuration and build steps than I thought I did
  • Finally saw results from game engine and movements in a rudimentary OpenGL view