RFCALC

My previous post about iphone programming included some complaining about the development environment. Well I'll admit I had the expectation that I should be able to just sit down, crank out some code, and submit it (as if I was using a program instead of creating one). I realize that was expecting a bit much. Once I bothered watching a few lectures of the Stanford iPhone programming class, looking at some more example code and finding apple's class definitions I realized that apple actually makes iPhone programming very easy. And once I got into it I realized that a lot of it, especially graphics, is much easier than I anticipated.

Version 3.0 (I'm being a little generous with version numbers, but at least I started with version 1) is submitted for review now and should be on the store soon. When I first started the app several coworkers suggested I make a smith chart tool and I said that the graphics would be too much of a pain. So I'm fairly excited that version 3.0 has a smith chart tool. And, maybe it is just because I made it, but I think it is in some ways better than the smith chart tool I have on my computer at work.

I decided to try adding iAds to the app (that was added in version 2.0). So far there are just two ads that run and I'm not really making money off it. But it was kind of cool to have the first app I've seen that uses iAds. And what I like about it is I get to see how many requests for ads occur so I get some sense of if the app is just being downloaded or if people are actually running it. Based on that the number of people using it must be much smaller than the number downloading it, but there's still a decent number of people using it and in surprisingly large number of countries.

Of course now that I'm getting (somewhat) used to objective-c and have some code built up I'm running out of ideas for what to do with it next.

I've been thinking a bit about why I've been enjoying iPhone programming so much. I think part of it is that I like engineering and design and while work sometimes fulfills that role, work projects can have very long stretches between successes. On the other hand, programming, well maybe just hobbyist level programming, allows me to make something and see it work over the course of a few hours to a few days. Far faster than even hobbyist level electronics design.

This is biggest program I've worked on in quite a while, most of my coding since graduation has been limited to single page perl scripts. So it has been cool to come up with the higher level structures (even though I'm sure it is pretty basic even compared to school projects). In particular it is great when all of the underlying objects have been built up so that a few lines of code can add a ton of functionality.