As a developer, I still find it necessary to support OSs other than 3.0 as many people have not upgraded as of yet. In particular, for GayCities, we use RouteMe as a map wrapper since there is no mapkit for OS 2.1. I grew frustrated only being able to use a label for pin information, as it doesn't look as professional as the map kit annotations. I decided to make a quick Detail View object to use in GayCities 2.0 as well as other future projects. Check out the project page for more details.

There are a few options for displaying a progress bar in the iPhone SDK. If you just need general progress, you can use a UIProgress object. but this limits ui options, so many choose to use a UI slider. With a slider, you can set the left and right track images as well as a thumb image (or nil if you don't want a thumb image). Back in iPhone OS 2.x, this worked perfectly, but with 3.0, the space where your 2 custom images meet shows a rounded end and a space where the thumb should go. All in all, it doesn't look too terrible, but it's still not that polished look that apple's UIProgress has. So I spent an hour the other day making a custom progress indicator. It's not as pretty as apple's, but it gives you many more options. You can specify any size you like, both height and width by changing the objects's frame. You can also set custom colors for the surrounding line, the progress bar, and the backround of the bar. I've posted the code for this in the downloads section and have some screenshots here. Feel free to use it as you wish. Email me with any comments or questions.

I just returned from my third class at The Big Nerd Ranch. As always, my brain is at capacity with everything we covered over the past week. For those of you not familiar with it, the nerd ranch is a programming school geared towards learning a large amount about a language in a short period of time. Each class is all inclusive, including lodging, meals, and a 5-7 day bootcamp on the language of you choice. You start each day at 8:30 for breakfast, then class begins at 9. We work till 12:30 with a mixture of lecture and exercises, then have lunch, followed by another few hours of work. At around 2/2:30, there is an optional walk to help your brain cope with what it has learned throughout the day and to wake everyone up. We end the day at 6:30 with a huge dinner, then the classroom is open till around 10, if you have any further questions. Otherwise, the evening is your to do with as you choose. The instructors for every class are experts in their field and a pleasure to work with. Each student has their own room with a queen size bed, balcony, and jacuzzi. What separates the ranch from other schools is the intensive nature and the fact that they have taken care of everything for you, leaving nothing for you to focus on except what you are there to learn. There are no distractions, no plans you have to worry about at night or what you are going to cook for dinner. For anyone looking to pickup a new programming language, i urge you to look into the big nerd ranch.



This last class, the advanced cocoa bootcamp, was for those who already have a strong understanding on Objective-C and Cocoa programming. The class, then takes you farther into the operating system, giving you the tools you need to really polish your application, using the new features 10.5 have given us. Specifically, we cover integrating spotlight and quicklook into your application. Creating menu extras and system preferences, and using distributed objects to allow separate task to communicate with eachother. After the 5 day intensive, you are really left with those extra set of skills to make your application a good Mac OS X citizen.