Last week I attended iPhone App School in the Castleknock Hotel in Dublin. This course is one of many courses offered by SQT Training Ltd. in Limerick and was organised by Daniel Heffernan, Patrick Collison and Damien Mulley.
The aim of the course is to teach “developers everything they need to produce their own apps—from writing their first lines of Objective-C to publishing their app in the iTunes App Store.”
The course ran over 5 days, beginning Monday 20th July and ending Friday 24th July. Each day we encountered a different aspect of developing for the iPhone. These ranged from an introduction to Objective C, to experimenting with MapKit and the Address Book to the analysis of the logs provided by iTunes Connect.
Each day provided it’s own challenges:
- Day One :: My challenge was getting to grips with the syntax of Objective C and figuring out where everything went!
- Day Two :: Getting to grips with delegates and protocols took a wee bit of time! All figured out in the end though!
- Day Three :: I took it upon myself to explore the innards of the MapKit! MKReverseGeocode ftw!
- Day Four :: Investigating GameKit was fun! Experimenting with some VoiceChat! Some network sockets were investigated also!
- Day Five :: iTunes Connect was explored in detail as well as seeing some logs from an active account. We also spent some time working on our own projects with some advice and guidance being offered by Daniel.
I applied to AppSchool with only a year of basic C# programming experience. Whilst some of the concepts involved in programming for the iPhone were new to me, with Daniel’s help I was able to make sense of them.
My week at AppSchool gave me the knowledge I needed to begin working on my first app.
Hopefully, the first of many!