Happy Thanksgiving 2020 everyone!
Just finished up the second module in iOS App Design, pretty fun! much less stressful than debugging lol. feels appropriate for the thanksgiving break. I was worried that the challenges at the end would be much more difficult.
I’m approaching the next level of difficulty here. The wife goes back to work on Tuesday leaving me with two boys in video school plus a super cute/needy 2 month old. It’s gonna be an adventure to do all that and also take CWC classes… I work all evening so the plan is to do it during lunch or late at night. The other option is to wake up a little earlier… oof that’s a tough one with the baby not sleeping… we shall see! Regardless, quitting is not an option! I will find a way!
Okay! Day number one of watching infant, running virtual school for 2 while the wife is at work while still attempting to take one CWC class per day… so far so good, I decided to just get up at 5am with my wife so I could get a quick shower in before she left and then watched the class while holding the baby. Fortunately for today this was a very straightforward class, all I need to do Is export my icons for the meal planning app from Figma. I haven’t actually done it yet but I grabbed some screenshots of the ones I need so I could crank them out as soon as I get a window of opportunity (ie. Baby takes a nap). This wouldn’t work on a heavy coding day, but it’s still early, baby just fell asleep and I do have time before the boys get up.
day 2 of chaos! waking up at 5am still seems to be doing the trick! I’m able to take the CWC class and prepare breakfasts and straighten house and accommodate baby all before the bell rings for school to start and I’m able to do it in a laid back drink my coffee and no need to rush kinda way. So we will soldier on!
In other news this new SwiftUI has caught me a bit off guard. I kinda wanna finish the track I’m on before jumping into SwiftUI, and I may even want to write my own app or two to polish up my skills before switching as well. I’ve already started wire framing a simple music note flash card app. Randomly one of the bloggers in the Music Teachers Association just today created 4 entire new sets of hand drawn music symbols in png and svg at colorinmypiano.com! I’m kinda inspired to use them in a simple app and send her a copy… problem being I still haven’t paid the $99 to join the elite apple development club lol. I need to find out how to just publish an app without having to put it in the store so I can give it to specific people…
day 3 success! this was a very long class, with an extra layer of chaos added on top, I woke up 30 minutes later than I had been on accident, then had to get the boys ready for picture day. plus I have a piano lesson at 9:00 that I needed to prepare for, and the baby was not sleeping. I was able to cuddle the baby to sleep in time to do half of the class, take care of all the other things, and then finish the class at lunch… whew!
This was a pretty exciting class as well, Chris went through a bit of how to code the UI programatically much more than usual, and while I don’t feel like I truly understand it, I’m a little less scared of it now. Who knew drop shadows had so many settings that needed implementing!
Youtube App API insanity! AAAARGH!! at least that’s how it felt yesterday lol. a 40 minute module on parsing the JSON data from the API and at the end my do catch block seemed to skip right on over to the catch lol. today I went ahead and took the UI module and then went back to do some debugging. turns out… I forgot an “s” … I hadn’t realized just how many thumbnail variables and enum cases there were! turns out there was a var thumbnail, case thumbnail, AND a case thumbnails<-- notice the s. lol so yeah when I went to debug It would get to the thumbnail case, and just freak right on out the window into the catch block lol. go figure. no worries! I added the s and now the whole entire freaking app is working perfectly. lol debugging feels like doing a sudoku that’s slightly harder than my usual difficulty level. really gotta dig deep to figure it out, but the answers are there somewhere…
Its been a full week and then some of virtual school / infant insanity, but I have been able to keep up with the classes so far. At this moment, all three kids are still sleeping and my wife is at work. The house is so weirdly peaceful… for 5 more minutes, and then I have to go wake up the boys for school… no no! one of them has woken up, damn. lol! I have no illusions, its all about the journey, these are probably the best days of my life and I love it! It is just a bit insane though.
I’ve made it to the last one day build… kinda. I’m skipping the swiftUI apps for now because I want to fill out my UIKit knowledge so I can cut my teeth on a UIKit app before branching into SwiftUI. Also I skipped the Note app because I didn’t want to get distracted by the JavaScript,
but I wanted to say that I really appreciate this section because especially with the calculator app, I’m able to review tons of concepts that we just kinda touched on before such as enums, casting Int double and strings, if let statements, not statements, and so on. all while not really introducing any daunting new topics.
Moving on to Animations!!! I gotta say, I’m suuuuper excited about this, it directly relates to the first app I want to write, and after doing the first module, it looks super understandable so far! I feel like I’ll be able to take this and really make something with it! YAY! I will miss the video format, but the written one is very very well done, cudos to @fuerte.francis !
edit: I may have burned through the first 4 in one day. lol haven’t done that in ages! helps that they are bite sized, and also that playing with the numbers on the animations is endless fun… and also that the boys are not in school and I don’t have to work. I have noticed the massive similarities between animations, and programmatically writing UI, this could be a much easier way to introduce programmatic UI to people
just finished the animations modules, that was probably the most fun I’ve had so far in these classes, despite the fact that its written and not video. It did take me longer than usual to get through them though simply because of the Hollidays. I plan to move on to sprites now and I really have no clue what sprites actually are at the moment, but I expect them to be fun as well! Happy New Years everyone!
Halfway through the Sprite modules and WOW! this is a whole new world of swift I just didn’t even know existed! and we’re just scratching the surface here clearly! I have the feeling when I finish these modules I’m gonna be hungry for more.
Looks like you have made a lot of progress from when you first started back in July.
That is probably since I am a school student whereas you are not 
sorry @Pratham_Hebbar , I gotta disagree with you. I have to wake up at 5 am to take this class each day. by 6 am I have to make the boys breakfasts, get them ready for school all while taking care of a baby, then because of virtual school and the baby I don’t get a break until lunch, which I use to… eat something lol, more virtual school and taking care of baby until 3:30. You would think virtual school would be easy, but basically if you’re not paying attention the boys just sort of wander away from the ipad during classes or just stop paying attention because of whatever else they decide is more interesting than school. Between classes, I try to get all of the youngest boy’s homework done…At 3:30 school is over and my wife gets home and I immediately start teaching piano until 8:30 at night. At that point I have to help put the boys to bed sometimes, but usually I get to eat diner, and then start cleaning the house to have it ready for the next day. Wife does what she can but she is also taking care of boys homework, baby, any evening classes the boys have to take etc. I usually finish cleaning about 11pm and head to bed so that I can get up the next morning at 5am to take the next CWC class… So no, its not because I’m not in school anymore. Its because I’ve decided I’m just not going to give up no matter what.
So that means you dedicate an hour to iOS Programming every day?
It is kinda crazy how much you have accomplished since July. Maybe you accomplished a lot during the summer months. Keep it going!
I know how hard life can be with 2 boys and a baby.
yeah the summer was helpful, I was able to work on some of the more difficult debugging problems I encountered then. These days if I need to debug something I simply won’t be able to spend the amount of time needed. fortunately the animation and sprite modules are tiny, only take about 20-30 minutes to go through and figure out and then I can move on with my day. Fortunate for me, this is a very temporary state of life. The boys will go back to in person school likely in the next 6 months or so, and the baby is 4 months old so over the course of the next year I will be getting a LOT more freedom with my time and will be able to dive back in to some of the more complicated aspects of programming. For now as long as I keep doing just a little bit each day, I know I’ll make progress over time
So can you please update me when you finish the sprite kit course?
Okay, I just did the collisions module in Sprites and whew! that was a doozy! turns out that I was trying to put a function for the delegate and protocol inside another function and the program couldn’t find it… didn’t create any errors though and I had a real hard time finding the problem. The class said to let Xcode add the function and that would have solved the problem, but… Xcode just didn’t seem to care about adding that function so I had to do it myself… not sure why that happened, perhaps its not a required function for that protocol-delegate? this is how we learn 
also what do you mean by beginner classes?
Did you mean beginner courses and modules?
I was probably talking about the iOS foundations section of the classes.