Sunday, April 13, 2008

My first iPhone Native application

Almost a month after the SDK release, I finally was able to build a native iPhone application. The application  is a translator application that could be used to translate text from english to eight different languages. Apart from text translation, the app supports dictionary and web page translation. This is still in a WIP. It uses the Google's Translation Data API to perform the translation. I still have some issues with encoding and needs more cosmetic work. I have also planned to add a save feature that will let the users save the translated text and view it later. It will also provide a easy way to email it or SMS (not sure). This application will also provide a URI that will allow other native apps to launch and translate text.


Wednesday, April 2, 2008

iPhone SDK + Interface Builder

I was so excited with the release of iPhone SDK and hoped I would be developing apps in no time like the demo showed by "Steve and his friends" . But not for long, I have almost entered the total frustration mode. Apple did a good job on their release with the first version of SDK with lots of documentation and example. The second version came as a complete disappointment to me. I can't believe they released a Interface Builder with absolutely no documentation or guide except for 10 lines of Release Notes. I am a complete newbie to Cocoa Framework and Objective C, never used IB but I am clearly not a bad developer. I have developed so many different apps for different platforms with different framework.
I really hope Apple releases a new version of their SDK + IB with more documentation/samples/guides.

Meantime, after some serious searching on the web I came across this link
http://ihatetheiphonesdk.blogspot.com/

I believe it's a blog of another frustrated developer but he has a nice tutorial on how to use the IB with the SDK.