Over on the development side of things, we’ve been keeping ourselves busy with an assortment of tasks.  Phil and Adam have been working on merging a simple line-drawing app that uses mouse clicks with a program that moves a square based on accelerometer output.  Joe and I have been getting interface images from the design side, slicing them up, and creating the menu that will be used in our drawing app.  

The menu is working really well, the transitions all look great, but we’ve stumbled across a few problems with Interface Builder.  The biggest problem is that it won’t represent pictures correctly in the building process, but when you compile and run the app everything looks the way it should.  Images are imported at a really small size with blurry features; you have to find out the original dimensions from photoshop and punch those in if you want your images to look right.  

Fortunately we will be done skinning the app soon, but in the mean time it is another nagging reminder that we are in completely unfamiliar territory.  That being said, I feel like I’ve learned a lot so far, and I can tell that my other teammates are becoming much more comfortable with Objective-C.  We took a long time to get to where we are now, but our productivity has increased exponentially now that we almost know what we are doing.

Development progress has been a little bit slower than we had hoped.  Objective C has some very unfamiliar syntax, and the learning curve seems a bit steeper than with languages like Javascript, Actionscript, and PHP.  Also, the book that the developers bought to help learning how to code on the iPhone says in the introduction that it assumes the reader is familiar with Objective C.  Of course, none of us are, which is why we bought the book.

However, it’s not all bad.  Interface builder, the drag and drop system for setting up prebuilt elements like sliders and buttons is pretty straightforward, and linking those elements to actions also seems easy enough.  We played around a bit with using buttons, tracing output, and setting up different views, creating the fairly boring program shown at the left.

Our second goal, figuring out the accelerometer, proved a bit trickier though.  It turns out the iPhone simulator on the computer doesn’t simulate any sort of accelerometer data, making it hard to tell whether or not we were doing anything right.

Our third goal, getting an app onto the iPhone, also proved to be fairly tricky.  We managed to get or developer certificates from Apple, but we ran still ran into some errors when we tried to build our apps onto our devices.  More on that later when we figure out the solution.