New Book

I now am the owner of Programming in Objective-C by Shephen G. Kochan. I am learning more about the syntax of Objective-C. I am also becoming more familiar with the key differences between procedural languages such as C and object oriented languages like Objective-C. I am finding it very helpful to hand type the example programs directly from the book. By not using pre-typed source code files I am learning more quickly and completely.

The book is divided into two main parts. The first part is about Objective-C itself in general. The second part is more specifically about the Foundation Framework. Thus far this is proving to be a review of things I learned about C and new things about the Objective-C extensions to ANSI C that are very interesting. I will tell you more as my study progresses.

Book Learning

I recently bought Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X(Third Edition) by Aaron Hillegass. It will arrive soon and stortly thereafter a will be smarter. Until that magical day arrives I will continue learning the C fundamentals from Mister Dave Mark’s book. I am enjoying developing my knowledge of C based languages programming.

if (myProgram == loops) printf (“SCREAM!/n”) ; else printf(“I can comprehend this.”) ;

I am studying the book Learn C on the macintosh: Mac OS X Edition by Dave Mark. I recently read through chapter 6 about flow control. I think I need to slow down and study loops and other flow control methods in more detail. I felt like I needed a flow chart to understand where the execution was going from one function, to another, to another.

Loops inside other loops, it is sometimes hard to follow mentally. You need to step through it with the debugger one line at a time to get a complete understudying of the execution flow. I felt that this difficult to understand concept was being thrown at me all at once. I do not blame the author or publisher. Dave Mark seems to be an expert on the subject. I am new to computer programming and will have some hard times learning the basics. I did not have time to absorb, test and understand it completely. I know it is a whole programming language I am learning. I know it is complex. What would you recommend I study in order to get a more detailed and in depth understand ing of flow control with if statements and while and for loops?

Computer Science 101

I am currently in preparations to return to college next January and pursue my degree in Computer Science. I will most likely be receiving a general understanding of computer science with my student projects being compiled for Windows or Linux. I heard the program administrator is a Linux user. I will apply what I learn there to the specifics of the Cocoa development environment and the Objective-C language. I will also be taking several general education courses, I am sure. I will make this my entry point into serious study of computer programming and will be less aspiring and more an actual developer after I get my associates degree.

WordPress for iPhone

I am writing this post from Automatic’s WordPress for iPhone app. This app should have been available on the eleventh of July.

From my iPhone

I am writing this message from my iPhone 3G. I will be sharing more news about my experiences with my new phone soon.

iPhone 3G

I wanted you to know that I will be buying an iPhone 3G on July 11th. I will share with you my experiences with the various built in functions as well as my impressions about third party software I purchase with the App Store. I have been following news about the new iPhone on the “internets” and am looking forwards to the experience of using the new phone first hand. Look here for more details about Apple’s new iPhone 3G.

Google App Engine Easier On Macs

I found this as an unpublished draft. This news is a little old, but still relevant to aspiring Mac Developers.

Google’s Official Mac Blog announced 15May the availability of a Mac launcher application for Google App Engine. This launcher greatly simplifies the process of developing Internet applications using Google’s App Engine. Google is known for allowing its developers to use 20% of their company time to developing personal projects. This launcher is the result of that 20% effort. The launcher is basically a software development kit (SDK) for the Mac platform. The launch can be downloaded on the App Engine Downloads page. The GoogleAppEngineLauncher is under active development as a Google Code project.

An Update On My World of Warcraft

I have been able to install the game now, but I am still getting the graphical glitches. Things like the ground around my feet, the confirm button on dialog boxes. and the moving part of the progress bar on casting spells are visually distorted. Also, when I exit the game in full screen mode, the whole screen turns gray. and the mouse cursor is the only thing the works visually. This has happened twice. I am forced to hold down the power button and force the system to turn off,. When I turn it back on, everything is back to normal. I have also had the Apple menu symbol on the top left edge of the menu bar distort out side the game when I was playing it in windowed mode. I am thinking of installing the combo updater for Mac OS 10.5. What so you think the problem is?

World of Warcraft Technical Problems

I have recently reactivated my World of Warcraft account. When I began playing I remembered that I was getting unusual textures in the game world. The textures for the ground/floor and for the punctuation marks over characters heads were all messed up.  I decided to delete the game completely, including shared and preference files, and reinstall.

The first time I tried to reinstall the installer failed on Disc 4. The next time it went all the way through the install, but failed in the patching process. I was installing the 1.12 to 2.0.1 patch and got an error message saying basically that the installer could not find the game files. The installer was in the games main folder. I have tried installing on both the administrator and standard user accounts. I have used Disk Utility to repair the permissions on the hard drive. I installed from CDs directly and copied and copied the installer files to the hard drive.

I followed the instruction given to me on the phone and in email by Blizzard. I decided to download the game client 2.0 version from Blizzard’s Website. maybe if the installer goes directly to the 2.0 version of the client, it will skip the patching issue and I can install the expansion from my CDs. The full client 2.0 download is over 3 GB and is taking several hours on my 1.5 Mbit/s DSL service.

Have you experienced problems with installing the game and getting errors about the installer being unable to find the game? Have you had trouble with textures on the ground/floor or the punctuation over characters heads after installing the 2.4 client patch?