It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. There are a few reasons for that, but one of the mains ones is that web development hasn’t really been exciting me much lately. Mainly I think this is because it’s often frustrating, both the development itself, but also dealing with clients who don’t know what they want. There’s nothing worse than having a client say “well, you’re the designer” but who then wants to change everything when you do use your best judgement.
The process of web development is also tedious and annoying. Cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility issues take a lot of time away from doing things that are more fun, like designing or coding. Getting a website to look exactly like you designed it in Photoshop is one thing; getting it to look like that in every browser is another.
It’s not fun anymore, which is a shame, but it’s also not totally unexpected.
Anyway, that leads me to here. Anybody who knows me would know I’m a big Apple user, with an iPhone, iPad, and Mac Pro, so it’s only natural that I would want to start creating things that work for them and try to make some money out of it. The natural choice was iPhone/iOS and Mac development.
Over the last few months I’ve been touching up on my existing programming knowledge and then extending that learning Objective-C/Cocoa for the Mac and CocoaTouch for iOS. It’s been a fun process, and it really gets my brain working like it hasn’t for a long time and I can tell my problem-solving and logic skills getting a work out.
I’m now at the point where I can start to put that knowledge to use. That means writing apps. Hopefully even selling them (though I am aware of the success rate of apps on the various app stores).
This also gives me the opportunity to start blogging again as I explore the frameworks that make up the Cocoa/CocoaTouch environments. As an “intermediate” level programmer it can serve as both a record of my progress, but hopefully it will help others who come across the same problems I do.
So, stay tuned while I start on what will hopefully be a nice career change.
In my next post I will describe my first smaller project, and the first problem I’ve butted my ahead against.