Woody Lidstone
Splice Training
September, 2010
We’ve received a ton of interest in Splice’s Mac & iPhone Programming Courses since we started as the first training centre to offer them in Canada back in 2008. From our first classes in Cocoa Programming to our iPhone SDK courses to now our iOS v4 course, I’m pleased to play my part in helping people learn the skills to take their app from concept to the App Store. Every month or so, I hear from a former student who’s excited to have gotten their app approved in the App Store. Perhaps one day that’ll be you?
Prospective students will often write to info@splicetraining.ca and ask about our iOS 4 Development Bootcamp, Foundation Level course. I thought I’d take a moment and tell you in my own words what the course is about.
In the iOS Foundation course, I tend to present concepts for 15-20 minutes, then there is an exercise for you to work on either from the book or one that I’ll bring along. There isn’t a great deal of iOSv4 books out yet, so I tend to move between different sources for the exercise content, finding things that relate to the lesson topic, but that are also easily created in an hour or so. While the students are working on the exercises, I’m helping them debug code that refuses to compile. (Usually someone has simply forgotten a semi-colon, an asterisk or an AT-symbol.)
As I say the course, there’s a massive array of knowledge covered by the iOS SDK and in the AppKit Framework (Cocoa Desktop). It’s impossible to be an expert in all areas, but the patterns and techniques used are common throughout all the frameworks, so once that initial hurdle is conquered, as is done in the iOS Foundation Level course, it’s easier for students to become independent and move on their own. A significant theme in the course is teaching students how the frameworks expect them to implement their code, how the documentation is structured and what the overall life-cycle of applications on iOS is. By understanding those things, students can rapidly locate the answers they need when there isn’t an instructor there to help guide them. As we get toward the end of the week, the amount of problem solving increases and the amount of fed-answers decreases because students are expected to be better-able to generalize the answers based on previous exercises, and then locate the answers
My background is about 15 years teaching & coding with Borland Turbo Pascal then Delphi (early 90s until 2005 or so). That was mostly Windows-based, primarily two-tier and three-tier code that performed automations & data syncing for a university from the AS/400 backend to a web-based front-end for student information requests. Another app I developed was a local cache for SAP, using their distributed objects architecture. Back in the early 90s, I also developed DOS-based TSR apps for mobile access (literally UART16550 controllers with an implementation of the Zmodem protocol for file transferring). In 2005/6 I spent a couple years at a start-up as a product designer on a product that hosted research algorithms for graphically manipulating a hierarchy of GUI objects.
After leaving Delphi-land in 2006 or so, I switched to Cocoa here at Splice. My time is split between teaching and coding, or leading development projects here. I don’t think I could possibly teach the iOS/Cocoa courses if I didn’t spend 20-30 hours in Xcode myself each week. It’s my after-hours hobby. At Splice, the projects I work on tend to be assisting previous students who need a guide or a head-start, as well as working on our internal apps. We’re not a development firm, but we do offer assistance to companies who have taken our courses, and write internal software for ourself or business-process-automation software for our consulting customers, and I lead those projects.
The schedule online is actually a front-end I developed for iCal. When Leslie enters an event into iCal, it shows up online in that incarnation via a JSON conversion against the iCal Server persistent storage. Our Halifax office also does repairs, so I developed a desktop app that collects the user information, populates their info into AddressBook and iCal (ie: when the item is due to be returned), and queries Apple’s backend services via the web-services in order to determine the repair history and warranty coverage. Then it presents it in an iPhoto-like interface.
At the moment, a co-worker and myself are collaborating on a project for a customer where their Microsoft SQL server is spitting out CSV data via a custom URL, which we use to instantiate a collection of native objects in iOS, then visually graphing the data on the device. They’re using it for realtime monitoring/analysis of their daily sales projections. It’s an interesting project for me because I’m not personally that interested in drawing graphics in OpenGL/ES (I prefer back-end and model/controller stuff), but it has given me a reason to explore some of the third-party chart & graphing libraries that are out there. The application is also noteworthy in that two of the views are actually webviews. They were easier to develop in Dashcode, so the webviews (and associated HTML+css) are embedded in the iOS Application Bundle, and we access the javascript DOM programatically from Objective-C, allowing us to parse and calculate in objective-C, display native graphs in a UIView, and display other content in a webView which doesn’t appear to the end-user as being a webview. It’s a rapid hybrid approach, probably something I want to work into the intermediate course.
I welcome any questions you might have about our programming courses. I teach the iOS, Cocoa and Objective-C courses, while our Postgres, MySQL, Javascript and PHP courses are taught by my co-worker, Alex.
Best wishes & Happy coding,
Trainer *woody = [[Trainer alloc] initWithCourse:@”iOSFoundation”];
Objective-C Bootcamp (5 Days)
Objective-C Primer (2 Days)
Cocoa Bootcamp
iOS 4 Development Bootcamp, Foundation Level
Woody Lidstone
Splice Training
September, 2010
We’ve received a ton of interest in Splice’s Mac & iPhone Programming Courses since we started as the first training centre to offer them in Canada back in 2008. From our first classes in Cocoa Programming to our iPhone SDK courses to now our iOS v4 course, I’m pleased to play my part in helping people learn the skills to take their app from concept to the App Store. Every month or so, I hear from a former student who’s excited to have gotten their app approved in the App Store. Perhaps one day that’ll be you?
Prospective students will often write to info@splicetraining.ca and ask about our iOS 4 Development Bootcamp, Foundation Level course. I thought I’d take a moment and tell you in my own words what the course is about.
In the iOS Foundation course, I tend to present concepts for 15-20 minutes, then there is an exercise for you to work on either from the book or one that I’ll bring along. There isn’t a great deal of iOSv4 books out yet, so I tend to move between different sources for the exercise content, finding things that relate to the lesson topic, but that are also easily created in an hour or so. While the students are working on the exercises, I’m helping them debug code that refuses to compile. (Usually someone has simply forgotten a semi-colon, an asterisk or an AT-symbol.)
As I say the course, there’s a massive array of knowledge covered by the iOS SDK and in the AppKit Framework (Cocoa Desktop). It’s impossible to be an expert in all areas, but the patterns and techniques used are common throughout all the frameworks, so once that initial hurdle is conquered, as is done in the iOS Foundation Level course, it’s easier for students to become independent and move on their own. A significant theme in the course is teaching students how the frameworks expect them to implement their code, how the documentation is structured and what the overall life-cycle of applications on iOS is. By understanding those things, students can rapidly locate the answers they need when there isn’t an instructor there to help guide them. As we get toward the end of the week, the amount of problem solving increases and the amount of fed-answers decreases because students are expected to be better-able to generalize the answers based on previous exercises, and then locate the answers
My background is about 15 years teaching & coding with Borland Turbo Pascal then Delphi (early 90s until 2005 or so). That was mostly Windows-based, primarily two-tier and three-tier code that performed automations & data syncing for a university from the AS/400 backend to a web-based front-end for student information requests. Another app I developed was a local cache for SAP, using their distributed objects architecture. Back in the early 90s, I also developed DOS-based TSR apps for mobile access (literally UART16550 controllers with an implementation of the Zmodem protocol for file transferring). In 2005/6 I spent a couple years at a start-up as a product designer on a product that hosted research algorithms for graphically manipulating a hierarchy of GUI objects.
After leaving Delphi-land in 2006 or so, I switched to Cocoa here at Splice. My time is split between teaching and coding, or leading development projects here. I don’t think I could possibly teach the iOS/Cocoa courses if I didn’t spend 20-30 hours in Xcode myself each week. It’s my after-hours hobby. At Splice, the projects I work on tend to be assisting previous students who need a guide or a head-start, as well as working on our internal apps. We’re not a development firm, but we do offer assistance to companies who have taken our courses, and write internal software for ourself or business-process-automation software for our consulting customers, and I lead those projects.
The schedule online is actually a front-end I developed for iCal. When Leslie enters an event into iCal, it shows up online in that incarnation via a JSON conversion against the iCal Server persistent storage. Our Halifax office also does repairs, so I developed a desktop app that collects the user information, populates their info into AddressBook and iCal (ie: when the item is due to be returned), and queries Apple’s backend services via the web-services in order to determine the repair history and warranty coverage. Then it presents it in an iPhoto-like interface.
At the moment, a co-worker and myself are collaborating on a project for a customer where their Microsoft SQL server is spitting out CSV data via a custom URL, which we use to instantiate a collection of native objects in iOS, then visually graphing the data on the device. They’re using it for realtime monitoring/analysis of their daily sales projections. It’s an interesting project for me because I’m not personally that interested in drawing graphics in OpenGL/ES (I prefer back-end and model/controller stuff), but it has given me a reason to explore some of the third-party chart & graphing libraries that are out there. The application is also noteworthy in that two of the views are actually webviews. They were easier to develop in Dashcode, so the webviews (and associated HTML+css) are embedded in the iOS Application Bundle, and we access the javascript DOM programatically from Objective-C, allowing us to parse and calculate in objective-C, display native graphs in a UIView, and display other content in a webView which doesn’t appear to the end-user as being a webview. It’s a rapid hybrid approach, probably something I want to work into the intermediate course.
I welcome any questions you might have about our programming courses. I teach the iOS, Cocoa and Objective-C courses, while our Postgres, MySQL, Javascript and PHP courses are taught by my co-worker, Alex.
Best wishes & Happy coding,
Trainer *woody = [[Trainer alloc] initWithCourse:@”iOSFoundation”];
Objective-C Bootcamp (5 Days)
Objective-C Primer (2 Days)
Cocoa Bootcamp
iOS 4 Development Bootcamp, Foundation Level
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