Tae Kwon Do and Another Test

    Tonight the family got to watch my son test for his Orange-Purple belt in TKD.  Pretty exciting stuff and I am a proud Papa.  He did great.  Now he has a friend over it is sounding like movie night.  Fun times and the kids earned it.  The whole family has been really working hard this week.   

    So what does this have to do with an App in 30 Days?  (AITD?  ATD?)  Not much, other than I don't think I will put in any more work tonight.  I did meet up with Jaime again and got some good feedback on the App.  Since I knew we were meeting, I had a pretty good prototype of the simple tabular scoring screen ready to show off.  I can honestly say you could play a game with 2-10 of your friends and keep track of everyone's score with this version.   It still has its warts and I need to add the ability to save and retrieve existing games.  The screens are working for all this, I just need to save the data.  

I am debating whether I will finish these items or move on to the iPad version tomorrow.  I think I will add the save function and then record the bugs for later.  I would like to think that the iPad version will be quicker to build.  The game functions like drawing the board, scoring, etc.. are already built and mostly in code.  Slap together some iPad screens of similar design and wire them up.  Sounds easy, huh?  We shall see...

- Geek Side Note -

I like XCode's Interface Builder, but sometimes you really seem to fight more with the tool than code.  It is the same with every Integrated Development Environment (IDE) I have ever coded with really.  The tools are great for putting together the right bits, but if you don't know how to tweak the bits using the IDE, it can be painful.  Sometimes the IDE even can restrict you due to some rules it needs to follow to build your program correctly.  Today I played with the relatively new Auto-Layout preview tools in Interface Builder.  It might just be me, but it seems that IB and UIScrollWindows could be friendlier.  So far, I have found it easier to use code to handle the scroll windows.  

Anyway, now the essential screens all work in both orientations on the iPhone.  I was feeling pretty good about it, until both Rebecca and Jaime managed to rearrange my screen elements in some weird way in a 4 hour time span.  Back to the drawing board.  Then Jaime had to make the comment about the smaller screen size of the iPhone 3.5 inch...   Ugh.