Of course within seconds of waking up I remembered I could just search for “read this first” and it would pull up that post… sleeping really does process things
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Sleep always helps! 
and stepping away from a problem
whelp! that’s the news app! done and dusted! it feels so weird… like that was the final app in the foundations module and now we’re talking about publishing apps… but I don’t feel any where near prepared to start publishing apps lol! so much more practice needed! That’s okay, I feel like I’m in good hands here. polishing off the foundations modules in the next few days and moving on to databases! I’m starting to get nervous just thinking about the stress of trying to get a build to succeed on my own! gotta start simple, I can do this!
Don’t put unnecessary pressure on yourself!!!
Go at your own pace and do your own thing.
thanks @MikaelaCaron !! I decided that was a wise approach lol! I went back and polished off some videos and excercises from foundations like debugging and such that I kinda breezed over on my first pass this week, while just fiddling a bit with that final module. Figma seems fun! School started with the kindergardener and 1st grader and I basically am just a teacher helper all day until they get off one hour before I have to work. But we are starting to settle in, so I was able to run a few lessons the last few days in between elementary classes lol! baby comes in two weeks soo we shall see how this goes, but I feel pretty fired up! ready to start working on the database modules! watched the intro today, hopefully tomorrow I get to actually code again, Its been too long lol. too many classes that don’t involve actual code makes me antsy!
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so my wife just requested a simple flash card app to flash sight words for my son. they wouldn’t need to do anything but shuffle and diplay each card after didtap and I know that would be pretty good practice, and I’m also considering over to the slots challenge … not sure yet
That sounds like a great project to begin with!
Also you can look at https://approadmap.io
Which can tell you what all you need to learn to build out your ideas
OMG I sat down last night to try to build the simplest app I could think of for that flash card app. Now I know that coding takes time, but my problem here seems to be forgetting everything I’ve already learned. All I wanted to do was put a big button on the screen and everytime you pressed the button it would change the title of the button to another card name in shuffled order… like how hard could that be?! first of all I couldn’t find a way to change the title of the button, then it took a while to remember I could make a dictionary of all the terms to give them a number identity, then var randomNumber = random.Int wouldn’t work I still haven’t figured out why. I changed it so that when you press a button it would change the text on a label so that was fine. But I can’t even figure out why it won’t let me call the RandomizeCard class sigh… so yeah, basically I’m saying I forgot literally everything I’ve learned lol this project is going to take some time. I think I’ll finish this before diving into databases because It’ll be a very good review for sure. also googling a few new ways to randomize a dictionary should teach me a few new things.
OK that was much better. Once I realized it was basically the war app with an added function of running a loop and avoiding duplicates I was pretty much home free… now I have a pretty clumsy looking app that works, but contains all the functionality so that I could make it look as nice as I wanted to just by putting time and effort into the design side. This was a serious experience in learning about all the gaps in my knowledge for sure lol! my wife was impressed with the app so that’s good too 
Wife and kid used the sight word flash card app tonight and loved it! Even gave me some feedback and now I’ve added a back button feature! Still need to resolve some UI layout issues in landscape and now my kid wants me to add it to his iPad. YAY! Fun. I’m envisioning what I would want a 2.0 version to look like… haven’t really decided. I want to use a slide bar so bad… but that would involve some serious customizing. I’d need it to slide by tens from 0 to 150, haven’t figured out how to do that yet, but the bendo might help. I also want to have a settings page to manipulate the word list but that seems way out of my current know-how box lol
Learning anything takes time!!!
You get the hang of it and eventually feel like you can do anything!
Why use a dictionary? Use an array instead and reference each element by it’s index
I know right! It took me a day and a half to figure that out lol. Originally I just assumed I needed a dictionary to keep the index and shuffle the dictionary (by the end I realized I didn’t actually want to shuffle anything, but originally that was the plan) so I pulled up the exercise for dictionaries which doesn’t mention array indexes lol so it took me stumbling on an array in a project on accident to remember that arrays have built in index else how would you access the array… duh.
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So today I just sorta surfed the bendos and youtube for how to do the slider bar. pretty good success I understand the bar much better now and know how to implement it in my app. Of course now I’m no longer convinced that that’s the best mode of collecting the data I want, but I’m going to probably write out that program anyways and call it sight words 2.0 lol then I’ll work on the practicality of data gathering later lol! I was forced to rewatch the segue modules today, as I now want to pass the selected word count over to a second view controller and run the main app there. I am definitely having more fun again now that I’m back into the code!! All while also psuedo-homeschooling the boys.
as for data collection my problem is I needed 15 buttons on the main screen which is just ugly when you connect all those IBActions to the view controller. I wanted the slider bar so that it would just be one IBAction and one IBOutlet connection in my code. Which works… but now the user has to make two possibly more actions on the UI to get what they want when previously they just had to tap a single button and BAM we’re off!! so now I don’t know… textField is even more work. If only there was a way to loop the IBActions so I don’t have to link 15 of them! lol
on the down side, my mom and sister’s houses were both pretty much destroyed in hurricane Laura last night. Both of their roofs are gone, and trees down everywhere… my dad lost a lot outside of his house, but his house itself seems okay thank goodness… I live in Dallas area so no problems here.
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So I’ve started my path toward my piano teaching apps. First I sent an email to a developer who used an app to identify notes coming through the mic. I asked them if there was a specific API they would recommend and they replied that I should investigate the AudioKit on github. So today was basically me trying to figure out how to get AudioKit installed so that I could actually type in “import AudioKit” in my viewcontroller lol wow what an adventure. But here I am 30 minutes before I gotta start work and it works! Not as simple as import WebKit where you just activate it in general let me tell ya lol Now… tomorrow I will actually start diving into the methods and seeing if I can actually make this kit work… it is quite intimidating let me tell you
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the AudioKit API has me frustrated… I was able to install it, but the first things it does is open a playground that is supposed to make a beeping sound for one second… it builds just fine, code looks fine… but no beep. I spent a whole day’s worth of coding time on it over the weekend and made zero progress. I can’t give up though, AudioKit is key for the endgame programs I want to write, so I’ll spend another day on it soon I’m sure… but for now I think I want to finally dive into the iOS databases classes! well… okay maybe tomorrow, today I want to write another cut and paste sight word flash card app for my kindergartener!
… 5 hours later:
baby showers and deliveries for work did get in the way yesterday, but today I was able to write another sight word app by cannabalizing the one for my elder son and just changing the words, but I did get tons of forced practice with auto layout and linking layout to code lol. apparently changing the name of a project is one of those No-no things that are frowned about by Xcode lol so I had to make a whole new project and redo the auto-layout, change the math to match the new grade level for the slider bar and other little things. It was enough to where I felt like I practiced for the day.
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Yeaahh, don’t change project names unless you know exactly what things you need to change.
This goes in general for most programming
Roadblocks everywhere!! its okay! I’m working on them, one block at a time lol. today its my videoconferencing schooling for the boys. apparently their system takes over google logins. soooo I can’t login to my google accounts anywhere, any login button takes me straight to the login screen for the school district for the boys. sooo… no firebase account for me! lol I sent in a ticket request to the school district, I will not be defeated!! … but I do have to wait for them to respond lol. It does feel good to be back into modules that have me feeling like I don’t know anything at all! I mean, I installed a few APIs working on my audio app, but this pod thing is completely foreign, and its been a looooong time since I saw a DOS like screen lol good to know that cd\ still exists after all these decades!
Chris has a video on cocoa pods for installing any kind of package
well I went through several lessons in the database section, Firebase databases have been fun so far. but it is crunch time. Baby 3’s c-section is this Thursday. I’ve been taking more and more days off on the approach of baby 3. However I’m really really hoping that I don’t just lose track and look up and realize its been a month since I took a module. I’ve already benefited massively from this class with the sight word app I whipped up, and my wife getting to show me off to her family gave me massive husband points on top of it lol. I do worry that I’ll just start losing drive and I want to push through that. programming is such a long road, I really hope I can keep my butt in the seat for the long haul.
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the Firebase modules are really short, with pretty easy exercises after each one, so I went ahead and knocked out 3 sets of them, massively breaking my rule to only do one module a day. But I had time and it really only felt like a single module. So that’s good.
… it occurs to me that this website is probably using Firestore… how meta
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