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Lecture 18 from the Stanford University iPhone Application Programming class was the class wrap-up lecture hosted by Evan Doll. He covered unit testing and localization on the iPhone platform, as well as answering some common iPhone SDK questions. The information he presented is somewhat relevant, especially with regards to the localization information, as the iPhone app store is becoming available in more countries.

Thanks to Evan and Alan and the crew, the videos were in general very informative and pertinent.

Oh, and Happy Halloween everyone!

A guest lecture for the Stanford University iPhone Application Programming class called “Creating New Expressive Social Mediums on the iPhone” was hosted by Ge Wang on June 1, 2009. Professor Wang talked about some of his projects at Stanford and from Smule, including demos of Sonic Lighter, Ocarina, and Leaf Trombone.

I wish I had an iPhone instead of an iPod Touch so I could use Ocarina.

Lecture 16 from the Stanford University iPhone Application Programming class was hosted by Alan Cannistraro. He covered using the audio APIs, playing back video content, displaying web content in UIWebView controls, and he talked about settings on the iPhone platform.

The APIs and controls Alan demonstrated were very simple, and really meant for basic usage only, which is fine for most applications. He did talk about and demonstrate how to use a settings plist bundle so that an application’s preferences show up in the device’s Settings application, which was mildly interesting to me.

A guest lecture for the Stanford University iPhone Application Programming class called “Optimizing OpenGL for iPhone” was hosted by Tim Omernick of ngmoco on May 22, 2009. Tim covered a lot of his thoughts on, shockingly enough, optimizing OpenGL ES code on the iPhone platform.

Since my familiarity with OpenGL is null, most of what he talked about was over my head. I do have some game ideas, and once I get motivated to look into how OpenGL works, this presentation should be helpful. Also, the fireworks demo application he showed was very fun to play with.

A guest lecture for the Stanford University iPhone Application Programming class called “How to Build an iPhone App that Doesn’t Suck!” was hosted by Steve Marmon on May 8, 2009. Steve covered some of his ideas on, shockingly enough, the guidelines of designing a good iPhone application.

One thing he pointed out that I found interesting was the process of UI layout. He pointed out that an interface should be designed 10 times instead of just once, the theory being that by the time you reach the 10th design of the interface, you have fleshed out all of the ideas for the interface.

Lecture 15 from the Stanford University iPhone Application Programming class was hosted by Justin Santamaria from Apple. Justin covered the photo picker, Core Location, and accelerometer topics during his presentation, none of which were particularly pertinent to my current projects.

Unfortunately, Justin did not show live demos of these components, which is understandable considering the fact that the simulator has limited support for these components. The code snippets in the slides should be sufficient for getting these things up and running.

At the end of the presentation, Justin also covered some hints on maximizing battery life on the platform.

Lecture 14 from the Stanford University iPhone Application Programming class was hosted by Steve Demeter from Demiforce and Josh Shaffer from Apple. Steve talked about his experience in putting together Trism, and his ideas on the touch interface on the iPhone. Josh then talked technically about the methods, events, and objects that make up the touch interface on the iPhone, and how to use them.

I probably should have watched this video before trying to do swipe detection (see this blog post) in my application, it probably would have saved me some search time and trial and error. Josh used a CGAffineTransform structure to track changes, which is probably the recommended way of doing this sort of thing. It is a bit of overkill for my particular application, as I don’t need to know about the zooming and rotations, I literally just needed to know if the person’s finger was moving left or right.

Lecture 13 from the Stanford University iPhone Application Programming class was hosted by Alan Cannistraro. He covered exceptions and debugging, using the UISearchBar, notifications, and key value coding.

I did not know you could set a breakpoint on objc_exception_throw, this seems like an awesome way to try and track down exactly where exceptions are happening in the code. Also, some of the key value coding and key value observing items he covered were pretty interesting and relevant.

Lecture 12 from the Stanford University iPhone Application Programming class was hosted by Alex Aybes. Alex covered using the address book functionality provided in the iPhone SDK.

His talk included several demonstrations of the C-based Address Book API, along with some of the ins and outs of Core Foundation, which shares many of the same concepts of the Objective-C based Foundation framework. His demos showed how to use the various person view controllers, getting person entries from the user’s Contacts applications, and diving into these entries to read and update the values existing in the person entry.

This does not directly apply to any of the applications I am currently working on, but no doubt it eventually will be useful in my development efforts. If you have a need to access the address book entries in the iPhone Contacts application, this is the presentation you want to check out.

Lecture 11 from the Stanford University iPhone Application Programming class was hosted by Evan Doll, who is apparently an achiever. He covered text input and displaying views modally, both of which I have had trouble with in my work on my various iPhone app projects that I have started.

His talk included a demonstration on the Clang code analyzer, using the keyboard with UITextView and UITextField controls, displaying and dismissing view controllers modally, and the proper way to dismiss said modal view controllers by setting up delegation in the parent view controller.

I have been developing an application in which it would be awesome to have some kind of custom virtual keyboard for entering data, as none of the canned keyboards seem to exactly fit the bill. This presentation should help me untangle some of the complexities that I have run across in trying to get this application done. Maybe then I too can be an achiever.