Saturday, March 21, 2009

Small Victory

I've been working on some things for the Empire Lyric Players (making rehearsal CDs if you must know), so I haven't been working on Project Samantha. I have, however, been working on making a couple of things work with Trivia. I got several new books* on iPhone development and one of the books finally had an example that did what I'm trying to do with the game.
One thing about the trivia game is that while it's similar to pretty much any other trivia game out there, trivia games are, by their implementation, anathema to iPhone user interface guidelines. There's no navigating back, there's no lists... It just doesn't fit the paradigm. Of course, since most books about developing for a platform (and conference sessions) tend to encourage the existing paradigms, doing something weird like trivia doesn't flow from the general texts. Until now, that is. :)
This book that I picked up, Beginning iPhone Development, is quite nice and has an example about multi-view applications that was just what I needed to move forward. There were some things that I wasn't doing correctly (and didn't realize weren't being done automagically) that doomed every previous effort to failure. With this new-found wisdom, however, I was actually able to get some of the flow working correctly. There is still a LOT to do to actually make the game into a workable system, but this was one of those A-HA! moments that gave me an insight into how the paradigm works. I was also able to extend some functionality without any trouble, which shows that I'm actually absorbing some of the Objective-C.
So, overall, a big YAY today as I got moving a little closer to understanding. And as I mentioned earlier, Samantha will actually follow more of the standard paradigm so it should be easier than trivia - amazingly.

* If you're interested, here's the list of books I've picked up so far: