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Lecture 10 from the Stanford University iPhone Application Programming class was hosted by Alan Cannistraro. He covered memory and performance, two topics that are often overlooked when developing software for mobile devices.

His talk included a demonstration on using Instruments to find memory leaks and memory allocations, the dangers of autorelease objects, and using NSThread and an NSOperationQueue to keep the program running during blocking operations.

If I ever get a halfway functional iPhone app developed, the information about finding memory leaks and threading should prove very useful.

Lecture 9 from the Stanford University iPhone Application Programming class was hosted by Evan Doll, clad in another interesting t-shirt. His topic of the day was persisting data on the iPhone by the use of property lists and SQLite databases, and communicating with web services using the JSON framework.

His talk was incredibly informative and straightforward, and I thought the demos that he used emphasized his points perfectly. Specifically, he covered reading and writing arrays and dictionaries to the iPhone’s file system, use of the NSCoding protocol, basic SQLite operations, and a demo that showed using the json-framework to pull down data from the Flickr web site and display image search results in a list. Finally, at the end, Evan talked about passing data between objects (such as from a list controller to a detail view controller).

The SQLite information should prove extremely valuable, as I am going to want to do some data storage in my iPhone app that goes beyond simply storing preferences in the NSUserDefaults area.

Lecture 8 from the Stanford University iPhone Application Programming class was hosted by a guest speaker from Apple. The topic of the day was tables and table view controllers. Again, there was lots of good information in the class. I have not really worked yet with tables in my iPhone application development so far, but I’m sure once I do, this information will help out.

Lectures 6 and 7 from the Stanford University iPhone Application Programming class contain a lot of useful information regarding the theory and usage of view controllers in general and navigation controllers and tab bar controllers in specific.

It took a bit of digging to figure out what Evan Doll’s shirt said in lecture 7, but apparently there is a band out there called Blitzen Trapper.

I just finished going through lectures 4 and 5 of the iPhone Application Programming class from Stanford University, and learned some more new things that I did not know. Especially interesting was the Stalker demo application that they did at the end of lecture 5, it was kind a neat little demonstration of animating views.

I have been checking out some of the lecture videos for the Stanford University iPhone Application Programming class CS193P, and I think they are very well done. I have been doing iPhone development for a little while now, and even though I am familiar with quite a bit of what they are presenting, there are still some things in each lecture that I did not know or was not crystal clear on the concepts for.

Here is a link to the course page on Stanford’s web site:

CS 193P — iPhone Application Programming

In order to watch the videos of the lectures, you have to download them into your iTunes through iTunes U. There are also PDF files on the above web page that contain the slide presentations used during the lectures, along with the class assignments and other documents.

So far, I have gone though the first 3 lectures. They do move a bit slowly when questions bog down the presentation, but you can’t beat the price, and other than the first introductory lecture, there should be value in each lecture for most iPhone developers.