KDBDallas

After a handful of requests to port Mobile RSS to the SDK/AppStore I decided to start working on it.

This has been an interesting task.

I have done work in the SDK and have seen the differences but porting an app really makes those changes visible.

The toolchain and SDK are very similar and at the same time very different.

There are a lot of new things that were added, like for example how they went controller happy. Like the ViewController and NavigationController. While they have given a lot of emphasis to these new controllers, most of the original items are still there (however a lot of them have new names). The new names are not huge changes, just enough to make the lifes of the developers who worked with the toolchain, harder then it needed to be. Like for example they made UITableCell UITableViewCell. Luckily most are very similar like that, so its not that hard to convert them, but it does mean that the code that is reusable can’t just be copied over, it also has to be updated to the new names, which brings in the extra task of finding out if a name has changed (compiler errors work nice here) and then finding out what the new name is.

I may be off with this comment since I don’t speak other non-computer languages, but I think it would be similar to trying to learn something like Portuguese when you already know Spanish. I say this because they are by no means the same, but have a similar background/base.

However for this being my first SDK app that has really has meaning, and is more then just more or less playing around, and with only having been working on it for 2 days, I would have to say that things are moving along. My hope is that as I become more comfortable with working inside of Xcode instead of just using TextMate, and I can remember all the little tedius things that I keep forgeting, since I didn’t have to worry about them when I coded everything by hand, that things will speed up even more.

I do have to say that having some documentation on the frameworks is nice, but at times its frustrating because a lot of the documentation is really bad. Yes, something is better then nothing but that doesn’t make it less annoying when the documentation is wrong or badly written or badly layout or badly organized, etc, etc.

Also, I know I have said this many times before, but Interface Builder, for being from Apple, sure is not very user friendly, even for developer users. Once you know it, sure it works fine, but thats because you know it. I think back to when I was learning it (and I don’t claim to know all the inner workings of it), and just how non-friendly or intuitive it is, including its tie in with Xcode.