Friday, August 12, 2011
Foggy day in Melbourne
When I got on the train this morning at Dandenong it was freezing cold and the sky was clear but when I arrived at work in Richmond it was thoroughly foggy. So I thought I'd try to take some photos of it with my iPhone.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Planets converging at dawn this month
During the month of May, Mars, Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus (and others) will become visible in the dawn sky, in a very tight formation only a few degrees apart. See spaceweather.com for more information.
I tried to take a photo this morning, but rushed it. I used my (Vinh's) Nikon F4 200, wide open, with the camera set to ISO 200 and used a shutter speed of 1/10s. Tomorrow I'll have another go and use a longer exposure time. I should have used a timer, because I got a bit of camera shake even though I mounted the camera on my Manfrotto 190 tripod.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Objective C and iPhone development
I've started trying to learn how to write iPhone apps, again. I've had one false start (12 months ago) where I tried to get a working app before learning Objective C first and failed miserably. This was partly due to impatience, and partly due to the lack of decent tutorials on the web.
This time, I'm going to learn Objective C first, and I've already found a great tutorial which explains the basic syntax of Objective C and how it differs from C++.
Then I will try to build some basic apps by following the Apple guides at the Apple iOS Developer Center.
To create an iOS app, you must use Apple's XCode, which means you need a Mac, and you need an Apple Developer account which costs $99 (but only if you want to build to an actual device, otherwise you can just use the simulator in XCode to see your app in action).
I've been told by some commercial iOS developers that Interface Builder is great for "standard" apps, but if you want to do something really funky, it's best to ditch IB and learn how to write all the code yourself. The reason for this is that IB does not write out source files for everything that you build - instead it bundles it all into an XML file which is not user editable, so it's impossible to do many customisations that you may be used to doing with NetBeans or Visual Studio.
This time, I'm going to learn Objective C first, and I've already found a great tutorial which explains the basic syntax of Objective C and how it differs from C++.
Then I will try to build some basic apps by following the Apple guides at the Apple iOS Developer Center.
To create an iOS app, you must use Apple's XCode, which means you need a Mac, and you need an Apple Developer account which costs $99 (but only if you want to build to an actual device, otherwise you can just use the simulator in XCode to see your app in action).
I've been told by some commercial iOS developers that Interface Builder is great for "standard" apps, but if you want to do something really funky, it's best to ditch IB and learn how to write all the code yourself. The reason for this is that IB does not write out source files for everything that you build - instead it bundles it all into an XML file which is not user editable, so it's impossible to do many customisations that you may be used to doing with NetBeans or Visual Studio.
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