Fourth Stanford Lecture on ‘iPhone Application Programming’

It’s available here. This one was given by Alan Cannistraro and I still think they’re not sticking to the title of the class.

They’re not talking just about iPhone Application Programming, but about main programming paradigms, using iPhone to show examples. And because their focus is on iPhone programming, they doesn’t spend much time talking about the paradigms.

Noticed this leads us to a contradiction? This can’t be good, because they don’t go deep on iPhone Programming, nor in ‘Main Programming Paradigms’. Anyway, there are some good parts on the lecture.

It can be summarized as follows:

• 10 minutes of review/administrative talk
• 5 more minutes (trying to) explain the delegation pattern
• 10 minutes explaining MVC
• The interesting part: nib files
• A look on iPhone MVC and Interface Builder
• Assignment 2

If you need a look on the delegation pattern, I suggest that you visit this link. The lecture won’t give you any insights on why to use it instead of subclassing. It’s really a matter of flexibility (with delegation, you can ‘change’ the behavior of an object dinamically, without using flags and ifs).

For MVC, try this. Don’t be fooled: It is common to have the view to know details about the model (although it is theoretically possible to isolate them from each other).

For nib files or Interface Builder, this is a good introductory lecture. Give the assignment a shot: It looks great. You will learn how to change the state of the model object through a user message (touch) AND update the screen. This is fairly all you’ll have to know to create any simple application. The next lecture, ‘Views and Drawings, animations’ should give you a glampse of how advanced drawing works.

Can’t wait to get on that!

Stanford’s “iPhone Application Programming” Third Lecture

I’ve been watching Stanford’s class on iPhone Application Programming. This is the third of a series of posts regarding these lectures, which began here.

I just watched this third lecture(iTunes link), given by Evan Doll. The lecture is great if you don’t have out-of-school experience with memory management (and Obj-C). This is actually my case, and fortunately I was looking forward to have an opportunity to begin working with it. From this perspective, it was good to see that Obj-C, iPhone version, doesn’t have garbage collection.

I guess most of the memory management will be taken care by the pool’s autorelease. If that is the case, and manual handling is only needed with more particular situations, I believe the the language can be productive (and help people write better apps). I guess one will only be sure about the frequency of use of each technique by actually using the language. Can any experienced Obj-C developer talk about this? Go for it in the comments section, and thank you for sharing.

Well, although this was a fine talk for me, the lecture seems too focused on ‘things that you will do offen’ and less on the internals of the language and platform. There were a number of questions that stood unanswered. Examples:

• Does something happen under the hood if I call ‘dealloc’ directly?
• What is the meaning of assigning something to ‘self’?

I’m sure there were others: If someone remembers any, just post on the comments. I’m gonna try to look for the answers and post here another day.

I’m not saying that don’t going deep is a bad thing — not at all, it allows people to focus — but I think many people will want to go a little deeper.

Note: Lecture four is already on Stanford Channel on iTunes U. Download it here(iTunes link).

Second Stanford iPhone class

I just watched the second class from iPhone Application Programming, Stanford University (iTunes link here).

I guess the class is all right, considering you don’t have a lot of background on OOP and stuff. But it’s kind of weird for those who has… All the talking about OOP could be easily cut, and that would spare 20 or 30 minutes to the ObjC interesting part. Also, the API part got rushed on, because the lecturer, Alan Cannistraro, was running out of time.

Apart from that, my first impressions about ObjC is that it is a completely different language from what most of us are used to. But seems a good language, mostly for being easy to learn and begin to use. It’s also kind of weird having a ‘NS’ appended to mostly (all?) of the system classes, but I can live with that.

The assignments look more interesting, I’ll post some stuff here as I get into them.

Stanford’s ‘iPhone Application Programming’ on iTunes!

iTunes U is a service provided by Apple for managing and distributing educational audio and video content. It is available through iTunes, as you probably figured out. It is a great place to learn new things, as long as they’re available. It’s also a great way to promote schools and courses throughout the world.

Turns out that Stanford University has a channel on it, and the latest course available is ‘iPhone Application Programming’. Now it is getting interesting…

The first two classes are already available, the first one was just OK, as Evan Doll (the Lecturer) talked much about stuff that don’t really matters for us, non-stanford-beings. Anyway, looks like it will be a great, hands-on, course. Ideally for those who are looking for the first successful apps at Apple Store.

Brazilian Universities could really this kind of marketing… But I don’t know of any that is using iTunes U. Do you?