Time for my end of day ponderings for day 3 at the Big Nerd Ranch.
I thought about this a bit yesterday but today it really struck me. This class and 
really the power that the iOS framework provides really taps into every major point of interest I have in software development and technology. I have not gotten to think about some of the concepts we have discussed here since my days studying electrical engineering at UC or my time at ITI working with graphics modeling and Open Inventor. For me, this week has truly been a wonderous trip down memory lane. I feel like I am in the Land of Oz. Thanks to the instructors – Jonathon Blocksom, Jonathon Saggau, and Michael Ward for that trip!
While we have covered the Cocoa frameworks in a broad, sweeping sense, the Jon’s and Mikey have added interesting historical viewpoints and perspectives. Bezier curves and surface normals take me back to fond memories struggling with the challenges of writing CAD/CAM data translation software and 3D model viewers. Those days were really the most challenging and fun in my career and while I still have fun today, I miss some of that excitement! I left the engineering software realm to go into corporate IT web development many years ago. Now with my present focus on mobile development and the driving market forces of the day I find that I may be ready to go full circle.
How and why? Demands for advancement in software development in the corporate IT field used to drudge along – typically held back by operations and security teams not wanting to move forward so as to protect things the way they are. With so many people now owning iPhones, iPads, and Android devices consumer expectations towards technology and above all the user experience has totally changed. This demand will drive us in the IT field to do better! The boring days of Windows and the status quo are thankfully over! Note this is an opinion piece and certainly I am sure some of you have a different one. Regardless, it is my belief that the opportunity to develop really cool, engaging, and challenging apps will now be forced upon every business entity or the consumers will simply move somewhere else. So to the simple, boring, 1980s style web forms and ugly web pages of the 90s I bid you adieu. To developers without passion, you are going to miss out on a lot of fun!
Today one Jonathan led us thru the power of OpenGL ES and GLKit. Yes I know OpenGL has been around for years, but most developers have never had to worry about it. Unless you are writing video games why would you care? Again, I can see a lot of people caring about this a whole bunch as we are forced to develop solutions that become more engrossing and more 3D. Good grief Dominoes Pizza even has a game now. I have been looking forward to a business need to get back to 3D development and this is it!
FFTs? What is that? Fast Fourier Transforms are something I haven’t looked at since my Signals and Systems class at UC. I use pitch shifting (just one of many uses for FFTs) quite a bit as a musician but never had the chance to work on incorporating that into a development project until yesterday. Again, it was great to have this discussion appear in the class. The possibility and capability afforded by today’s consumer grade hardware is truly astounding!
More than anything this week I have began to appreciate the parallels at the technical level between two of my favorite things – audio (MUSIC, MUSIC, MUSIC!) and video and the power that Apple’s collection of frameworks has given today’s developer to create new things using both. The mathematics using linear algebra, modifications with filter chaining, and low level patterns for hardware acceleration are common to both. I haven’t been this energized about development for many, many years! It was pretty hard to get excited about SOAP and EJBs. Yesterday I tweeted that I had spent more time in this computer lab than any other time since college and I have truly enjoyed every minute of it.
The one sad note for the day… It rained so unfortunately no afternoon hike and thus no new pictures.
This class sounds rear. I’d like to talk to you more about the class. I enjoy iOS programming – but do not really spend any time developing. I spend most of my time managing.
Wwdc was a great experience last year. I stopped by a Walgreens on the way back to my hotel and bought some graph paper.n I started sketching out ideas for a few games I want to see on iOS. Unfortunately, I had to deal with work issues and this torpedoed my project.
Hi Chris! Nice to hear from you! Yeah I’d like to talk more about the class. As you may have guessed by what I wrote, it has been amazing and energizing. My first WWDC this past summer was also my “welcome to the mobile team” moment. In that it really kicked off my rather steep learning process trying to figure out Cocoa/Objective-C, etc. It was an awesome conference and I really hope to head back this year but I had less ideas and more “huh? I really need to learn more about that…” moments.
Now after several months of COCOA both day and night I really got a LOT out of this class and think I kept up pretty well with everyone else.
Everyday this week I have added to my growing list fo app ideas. Hope I can keep the excitement up when I return home tomorrow night!
Let me know when you want to get together – maybe for lunch?