KDBDallas

They always say that admitting there is a problem is the first step.

I entered this relationship with my iPhone 3G after Steve Jobs introduced us. Steve promised me that it was the right idea to breakup with iPhone 2G and join the big boys with iPhone 3G.

At first it was all good. That sexy body, 3G, GPS, double the disk space, a flush headphone jack, and that new 2.0 firmware, and Steve had assured me that the SDK would fulfill all my “needs”.

If only our relationship had stayed that way.

Instead, iPhone 3G started to change.

We will be talking and she will just go blank and leave me there alone.

She teased me into Exchange support for my work email, but then behind my back turned off my never-auto-lock, and put a key code on the front door and wont let me remove it.

And as for keeping me fulfilled… It’s more like unfulfilled….

Steve told me I would have the same API’s that they have, but that was a bold faced lie. Instead iPhone 3G’s SDK is a tease. She shows off all the things that she can do when you hang out with her, but then when you try and get some of that sweet loving she yells at you and tells you, “That’s only for Apple.”

I feel so betrayed and hurt…

Then I heard Pwnage was being released and I thought I would at least get to see a little of my old iPhone in Miss 3G….

Once again she turned out to be a big tease!

This time she is playing the give a little, but withhold the real goods.

She gave me back my SSH access, but changed around all her frameworks so none of my old code will work.

Then she teases me into working with the new toolchain, by saying that with just some little changes I can still use that code. So I gave into my geek needs and started making those “small changes”. She forgot to tell me that a lot of those small changes would be small if we had documentation but instead I get to play a searching game to try and figure out all the unknown changes that cause my code not break.

So after a night of fighting, we had just about made up and decided we needed some sleep. Then today she decided to leave me. She locked up and refused to boot.

I finally talked her into unlocking, but then she told me she needed to “sync”. Funny how she forgot to mention that this sync would take 2 hours.

Then after work she “we” decided it was time to try and finish making those “small” changes. Well this just lead to ANOTHER all night fight. Finally I thought we had made up and she compiled my code without errors. I was so happy, but I guess its fun to watch me suffer, so when I tried and run the code, she left me again and locked up.

We are trying to make up again, but once again she needed her “sync” time. She has been gone for about a half hour, and I am thinking I shouldn’t expect her until morning.

I am sure you can agree that this is a pretty abusive relationship I am in. (usually it is the guy that is abusive, but not in this relationship)

I am thinking we need couples counseling.

I think it might be best if we get Steve to come to a couple of the sessions.

Only problem is I don’t see a section on Apple’s site for counseling sessions at the Apple stores.

Maybe I am forced to be abused…

Hopefully Steve will have a talk with her and give her some relationships tips in firmware 2.1. However I don’t think Steve is willing to talk to her about putting out in the SDK bed, so I might be forced to keep working with her in that area. Hopefully someone can come out with a relationship documentation or something….

If you are in the Phoenix area and want to put together a support group, let me know.

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.