Published on
January 2, 2010 at
11:20 pm.
I’ve been feeling like working on an iPhone app for a while now, so today I went ahead and re-did the whole iPhone certificate and provisioning profile setup because those were the only things I forgot to backup when I installed Snow Leopard. I decided to continue work on a prototype I had began a few months back. Basically it’s a “This Day in History” type app that tells you notable things that happened on any given day of the year. There are already a few apps like these in the app store, and a few months back I even bought what seemed to be the best out of the ones there and it ended up being really really bad. The whole “This Day in History” thing takes me back to sophomore year of high school where my teacher would give us a “This Day in History” fact every day before class.
After about 2-3 hours of work I had a working prototype which was able to download the source file from wikipedia and parse it into the most pure and basic form with each event separated into the year and the actual event description. The download happens asynchronously thanks to the open source ASIHTTPRequest project. The actual parsing is done in two parts by NSXMLParser. In the first iteration, the XML is parsed to retrieve the actual article content. In the second iteration, result of the first iteration is fed back into the parser in order to retrieve the actual events list. Once the events list is retrieved, it is then parsed one last time with regular expressions, thanks to RegexKitLite, in order to separate the data into key-value pairs of event year and event description.
The prototype’s intention was mainly a feasibility study in the realm of data retrieval and parsing. Now that I have successfully retrieved and parsed the data, I should be able to build an actual application and hopefully present the data in a nice, slick interface. This app is of course nothing revolutionary haha, but it’ll keep me busy and practicing Objective-C and the iPhone SDK, whilst hopefully being the first app I publish to the App Store.
Published on
January 1, 2010 at
1:27 am.
I just felt like making a quick post since it’s 2010. I wanted to see the 2010 date on something right now haha. I’ll make some posts soon, I was trying to make a few earlier but didn’t get around to it. I have quite a few projects and things going on, with the most recent being this new site style I created from scratch. I’m also looking forward to working on some sites with either Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET MVC, and jQuery. I also really really want to make at least one iPhone app, and I already have a working prototype.
Anyways, I’m going to go watch District 9, even though I already saw it, with Joel and my brother. By the way, I watched Avatar yesterday in 3D IMAX and it was amazingly awesome. I loved it. It was like what I imagine watching color television for the first time must have felt like.
Published on
May 3, 2009 at
3:22 pm.
I haven’t been writing much lately because most of my posts were just work out log posts, and they were becoming too repetitive and pointless, I use twitter way more now and it works for that just fine. But yeah, I have been working out. That hoody that I got from American Apparel is awesome, I ordered another Lapis Blue one that should arrive on Tuesday. Anyways, I registered as an iPhone Developer earlier this week, like on Tuesday. Paid my $99 + Tax and a few days later I figured out how to run apps I create on my iPhone. It’s pretty frickin awesome. I’m loving Objective-C and learning more and more Cocoa (Touch). I’m just familiarizing myself with the iPhone SDK right now and then I’m going to begin working on some ideas I have.
Also this week, the same day I registered, I cleaned out my bookmarks. I had a little over 1,000 and it was a big collection of old bookmarks that I only used once and was positive I would never use again. They were organized alright, but unnecessary. Thanks to XMarks (Formerly FoxMarks) I’ve been able to backup and maintain that big collection of bookmarks. According to XMarks, I went from 1,000 something to a little over 200. My bookmarks were probably the only thing I haven’t had organized that was beginning to annoy me, such a good feeling to have everything organized now :) My Programming bookmarks folder was easily the biggest haha, sometimes you just have to delete everything and start from scratch, and that’s what I did.
Been seeing lots of racism and bigotry lately in the news (One guy was suspended from the radio for it thankfully), so I’m gonna finish this post with this awesome video :D
