Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Finishd iPhone classes on iTunes by Standford U

Today I finished all the 16 classes, as well as some lectures by guests on iTunes. Not sure if there are any more coming or not. Anyway, it is really good program. It does provides very clear and overall picture about iPhone development. It helps me a lot to understand Cocoa and Object-C.

With many years of .Net development experience, I have to relate some aspects to .Net C#. Cocoa and Object-C are really interesting framework and it looks very powerful. I really like their unique features.

For example, objective-C is a dynamic type language. You can add or define properties or methods dynamically and you can call on methods without worry their existence. Calling a method on nil will not cause any exception. Of course, it is controversial issue, as the instructor mentioned. No exception may bring some bugs. You expect some results but nothing happening. However, xCode and some tools are available to help to detect all those issues.

Another great feature is the delegates in Cocoa and Objective-C. They look like methods defined in an interface in .Net, but they can be optional. SEL is a great will to describe delegates and it is widely used to describe and detect their availabilities. Delegate is a way to delegate actions to objects to inject actions instead inheritance. This provides valuable flexibility to delegate class or object to take responsibilities.

Cocoa framework provides many functions, classes and controls which makes Mac and iPhone development much easy with great features. Cocoa and Object-C works well C codes. This provides much wide range of APIs and tools from open-source world, or you can build tools and libraries based on them.

I have been watching those class shows in the past weeks, one show a day during business days and two shows on weekends. Now I finished all of them. It is time to roll my sleeves up and start a new adventure in Mac & iPhone development.

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