iPhone boot camp in London

iPhone boot camp was excellent - learnt loads on how to ensure quality apps. Very intensive - have a blister on my thumb from typing code!

Course Funding

To help pay for the course I was surprised how many possible funding options I found.   The following were useful and EEDA R2R paid for my iPhone Course which was obviously a great help.

EEDA Response to redundancy funding
EntitledTo
TechFluff

Core Data

I have found the following book really good for getting my head around core data....

Core Data: Apple's API for Persisting Data on Mac OS X by Marcus S. Zarra

Also, the following tutorials by Manning really helped me understand how Core Data deals with one-many relationships using NSSet....

Manning Core Data Tutorials

iOS SDK 4

Firstly I had to upgrade to Snow Leopard and after a 12 hour wait (my lovely Internet connection!) - I actually successfully installed iOS SDK 4!

Although after 5 minutes excitement - I realised that nothing seemed to work now!

I had changed my 'project settings' to the correct version but a few lines of code and background colours that I had chosen seemed to conflict with the upgrade.   I am glad that my iPhone application has not been published yet as I am sure such changes are very difficult when your app is already live.   It is good to see the type of changes that an upgrade can cause in a nice (safe!) test environment.

TinyUrl and Bit.ly

Added application page from my website www.vitvot.co.uk to http://Bit.ly 

It is now also known as -

bit.ly/imadethisapp

The advantage of adding my site to bit.ly is that I now have a short URL that is specific to my application.   I can also access stats on how/who my site is being accessed by.

Another company that offers a similar function is tinyurl.com.

iPhone Courses and Forums

There seem to be more iPhone courses available now - I have considered the following...

Leeds NTI / Shiny Development
iPhone Boot Camp
Academy Class

I wanted to ensure that I get quite an advanced course as I don't want to be sitting there learning all about 'if' statements!!

I decided that if they require you to have your own Mac - then the level of the attendees is such that they have at least installed the SDK and at the very least ran a few projects.

I also checked out the course lecturers - to find out what applications they have published.  I feel like a stalker - following tweets to see if a given developer is in the 'know' enough to have me as a course attendee!!  I guess this is how Internet research has changed now!

I decide on iPhone Boot Camp September meetup as Charles Gamble (the lecturer) seemed really experienced.   Also, the course details kept using the word 'intensive' so it sounds like it must have some pace to it!

It may also be useful to meet other developers to bounce ideas off - after working in a development team for so long - forums are your only colleagues when a coding problem arises!  The following sites have helped me out of a few jams...

Stack Overflow
iPhone Dev SDK
Apple Forum

iPhone Application Sales

I have downloaded the application sales app and I cannot wait to see my application sales displayed!

I really liked the article Resize an uiimage the right way - basically if you take bits of code from all the samples on the internet to solve problems - I think you end up with a hyrid project with lots of hidden bugs.   If I reuse code - on the whole I make sure I understand it before using it but there has been the odd occasion that I pasted a bit of code and thought "I will get back to the bit!" and move on to the next problem so it is a very easy trap to fall into.

I think a course is the way to go so that you understand all the topics from the ground up - inside out!