Posts Tagged cs193p

CS193P Study Group: Session 2

Posted by rad in Programming, iPhone on February 19, 2010

Session 2 was conducted on the same venue as, and right after the PhRUG meetup.

Attendees:
topher
rad
eumir
buddy
tin
nico

There were two new attendees, tin and nico, who promised to catch up with the previous assignments.

We discussed memory management. The following questions were raised:



When should you call release on an object?

When you’re the one who did the alloc for the object.



When should you not call release?

When you did not do the alloc for the object.



Why bother with alloc and init at all, when, for example, you can use class methods that do it for you?
For example, why use:

NSString *my_string = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"format"];

when you can instead the format below?

NSString *my_string = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"format"];

Answer: The stringWithFormat call returns an autoreleased object. On the Mac OS X desktop, there’re practically no difference. On the iPhone, you want to limit the number of objects in the autorelease pool and use alloc/init most of the time so that you can be explicit (and optimize) on when you call release.



As before, let’s try to do Week 3 in one week. That means lectures 5 (Views, Animation, OpenGL) and 6 (View Controllers), and assignment 3 (HelloPoly II). Let’s aim to view the lectures and finish the assignment by next week and have a meetup Thursday next week, February 25.

For those that are catching up and still working on previous assignments, feel free to post questions about them, both on the forum and on meetups.

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CS193P Study Group: Session 1

Posted by rad in Programming, iPhone on February 5, 2010


We had our first session last night, February 4. Johann of Sagada Solutions was kind enough to host the meet-up.

Attendees:
paul
topher
rad
johann
eumir
buddy (cakey)

We skipped discussion of assginment 1A as it was really very simple and no one had problems with it.

Assignment 1B has four sections, so we took turns in discussing our solutions. Paul discussed section 1, Topher section 2, Rad section 3 and Eumir section 4.

Topher mentioned some confusion in creating the project under XCode 3.2/Snow Leopard. The screenshot provided by the handout was for XCode 3.1/Leopard. If you’re on XCode 3.2/SL, see the screenshot below on how the New Project dialog should look like.

Create New project dialog for Assignment 1B under XCode 3.2/Snow Leopard

Everyone was excited and wanted to try a bit faster pace. Tentatively, the next meetup is on Thursday, February 11. It will cover Lectures 3-4 and assignments 2A and 2B. We’ll check our progress over the weekend, and if this pace doesn’t seem workable, people should cry chicken as early as Monday, February 8.

Lastly, the off-topic discussions were also productive. Here are the links to the tools mentioned in passing during last night’s meetup:

Topher’s framework of choice for building iPhone apps:
http://github.com/blog/389-three20-iphone-ui-goodness

Rad’s framework of choice for building iPhone games:
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/

Rad’s framework of choice for Flash games:
http://flixel.org/

Interesting paper prototyping tools:
http://apress.com/book/view/9781430228233
http://www.appsketchbook.com/

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The CS193P Study Group is starting next week

Posted by rad in Programming, iPhone on January 23, 2010


The CS193P study group is starting. Some changes in the mechanics:

  1. The study group will move at half the pace of the CS193P class. This means two lectures and 1-2 assignments every two weeks. There will be one meetup every week.

Week 1 starts on January 25, 2010. Everyone views the lectures and works on the assignments on her own. There will be a meetup on February 4 to discuss concepts and assignment solutions.

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CS193P Study Group

Posted by rad in Programming, iPhone on January 16, 2010


I’m organizing a iPhone programming study group, based around the online materials available for Stanford CS193P (see my previous blog post).

The mechanics are still being ironed out, but here’s what I’m envisioning:

  1. The study group will move at the same pace as the CS193P class. This means two one-hour lectures a week, and one assignment a week.
  2. Each participant will view the lecture videos on her own
  3. Each participant will work on the assignments on her own
  4. There will be an optional once-a-week meet-up to work on assignments together. Everyone still work on the assignment solution individually – the assignments have been designed that way – but the meet-up is an opportunity to have a high-bandwidth discussion on difficult concepts.
  5. There will be once-a-week meet-ups to “submit” assignments and discuss solutions.

The meet-ups will from 8pm to 9pm and will be held in the Ortigas office of Sagada Solutions.

If you’re interested in joining the group, please join this Google group.

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Stanford CS193P Winter 2010 has just started

Posted by rad in Programming, iPhone on January 14, 2010

A new class has just started, and the material has been updated for iPhone OS 3.0. Videos of the lectures are available for free in iTunesU one week after the actual class.

Watching the videos (of the 2009 class) and working on the assignments has been the best iPhone programming exercise I’ve done so far. Highly recommended.

Follow the class here: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/

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