Week 4 begins... XCode be trollin!

Today (Monday) I finally got to really start my code. I have many problems to solve in the next few weeks. Things just seem to be continuously added to what I have to do. Monday has been very productive I have been firing through the Galaxy part of the app which is now called Astronomo. I was working on switching views between portrait and landscape which was much easier than I thought it would be. I need to get some table stuff sorted out tonight and start implementing my core data then tomorrow I hope I can get what I get stuck on in core data explained and have a huge amount of the basic framework out of the way.

Towards the end of last week we were given lectures on Maps and annotations and also a lecture on core data and web access. The lectures were good but somewhat hard to follow with not much background in the subjects and the lovely XCode crashing in the middle so I just sat and took notes. I am making a lot of progress now and I think I will have my app finished on time as long as my mentor Luke doesnt go "dya know what would be cool" another dozen or so times. he is very good at adding layers of complexity to everything. Its all off course productive but you sometimes see people with apps where it is just the normal stock Apple tool kit that is used, something in the grand scheme of things is very easy to implement. although he is right for the most part. i did something today that i though would take like 3 days in 2 hours. well i have the foundations for what i need to implement down, I just need to do a bit of math and the the graphic work from the designers to implement. I think Luke see's something that I dont know, he knows these things are not hard to implement but i dont know how to do and im like this will take ages to do, considering I thought core data something that should be so simple to implement is so difficult, I have no idea how to do it but with my good friend the internet most tasks can be accomplished pretty easily. some things you would expect to easily find are very difficult to find but you always get there in the end.

this is an image from Code Slice which is an interesting sort of monthly technology conference internal to Kainos where senior engineers and people from other departments come and fill you with their wisdom. I have gone to 2 of these and they are really good. helpful and interesting. Have to be in work at 8 on a Friday morning to go to it but I think it is really worth it because learning from professionals is the real way to learn.

The following 2 photos from Kainos board room is where we get much off our lectures and other interesting stuff. its where we learned about the Google maps api and annotations, Core data and off course web parsing. Google maps is lovely to use Core data however is definitely not. Sometimes I think I would be better off smashing my head repeatidly off of a wall then trying to get through core data. Once it is implemented though it is brilliant. 

And as promised my proposed splash screen from the 2 geniuses in graphic design.

Week 3, half way through.

It’s been some week. This is the first coding week and I have not done a tap of coding, mainly because I have to get my database done and out of the way, I have been an information gathering machine basically for the past 3 days. Today Wednesday seems to have been the most productive day out of the three, I think it just takes getting used. Basically now I think I am finished gathering information. I gathered it and added it to an excel spreadsheet to save time and now I have to convert it to a well laid out XML doc. Transferring the data will probably be time consuming. I’m not sure I might try and get it out of the way tonight or just relax a bit. Feeling a bit exhausted to be perfectly honest. Being somewhere, where you do not know anybody is hard.  There is no support structure or nowhere to go, My friends go home in the evening to where ever they live which is non Belfast. I don't just go home and work but even when I do try and relax all I seem to do is stress over what I have to do. It’s like a horrible infinite loop, my tiredness is leading me not to do work in the evening and the amount of work I have to do is what is making me feel tired and lousy.

However I do feel a lot better now that most of the information I need is gathered and that the user interface design geniuses Gavin and David are hard at work. I always felt as though I did not want them to have to do so much work for me that I could do it myself given my interest and experience in design and they have their own huge work load but compared to what those two can do I am nothing. They always come around with something and my mouth just drops in awe thinking omg. The first time I thought maybe it was a fluke(they couldn’t possibly do something like that every time I was thinking) but they seem to be doing it every time they come down from whatever lab that they build these amazing concoctions in. I think maybe I will need them to do more to keep the whole flow of the app right but it looks more amazing than I ever thought it would.  Well anyways some cool looking stuff due soon. Get a look at the user interface in the next I would say.

Week 2.... What a week

This week we were on the BBC news video below.

ok so this week was interesting. One of the graphics buys Gavin got back from his holidays and is talking about doing a logo for the app. He did one for my friend Stuart and it was bloody amazing in my view


its small there because I took it from his twitter but I think its amazingly good. he did it up in like an hour I think. I really realised how good Kainos is this week. Its not just brilliant developers they have an extremely well rounded package from the designers to developers to testers. They always make sure a product meets their amazingly high standards before being released. I am looking forward to see what they come up with for me.

This week we basically concentrated on code design, not really coding but design before we start. We identified what classes we would need and wrote the algorithms we needed to create in pseudo code. I think next week we can get down to implementation.

Week 2 at app camp

Its wednesday and I just realised I havent blogged since Saturday so I thought I would post an update.  

Kainos Reception and front door.

reflection is not obvious at all. There is a pretty building behind me though

My desk at work in Kainos. ( I cannot work without a Windows machine beside me)

Anyways this week is code design week. Its been a hard week so far because I spent practically the entire day arguing with a user interface guy about how it should be done and then thinking of how i would redesign the UI. In fairness he is right, as a software engineer we always want to do the cooler thing because, well just because. We do things because it seems cool and we are curious about finding out how to do it. The things i want to do that are super complex for me makes it more complex for the user to use. Being good to your users is important so i caved and realised he knew exactly what he was talking about and was right. 

This week I seem to be ignorant to what I should be doing. I have tasks set out by UI guy(David) and the software engineers. the software engineers things are planning and Davids things are building a prototype to test it. I decided to do Davids task first because I miss coding to be honest and I really want to get the UI down so I can move onto more pressing matters, I will off course do my tasks that are set but might leave it late and not get it done to my normal standard. 

The week is going well though, even though my original idea was destroyed it does make the app easier to make. I have been more directed to a good user experience so I will follow it.

splash screen prototype

End of week 1

So the week 1 of development is over. I cannot say that it has been all that productive. Its probably just me though because I dont feel satisfied until things actually get done. This is probably the better way but I am feeling like I am not doing anything even though I put in a load of work everyday. After lunch today being a bit of an exception.

I went a bit against the "rules" and made a bit of a prototype which actually looks nicer than I thought it would. what you are supposed to do is not that obvious so I might have to take another look into that.

Design and the way I am going to do things is basically down but I think I will actually spend the weekend doing research into all the information I need for the app. There is a lot I need to include and finding it has been a bit of a bother. Information is sometimes is blotchy so there might be information for one thing and not for other which makes it hard to build when you have a database and you are trying to categorised.

Other than that quite a good week. Big productive weekend ahead I hope.

Kainos App Camp so far...

This is my first blog post and because I have set this up fairly late I need to write a good bit of catch up.

Firstly I won a place in a very prestigious software engineering competition with Kainos Northern Ireland (kainos.com). The name of the competition was called App Camp (appcamp.co.uk) and it is for budding software engineers to learn about developing for iOS which is the operating system that is used on the Apple IPhone and IPad along with Kainos generously giving us the "kit" we need to develop on them. They gave us an Apple IPod touch and a MacBook along with all the software we need.

In order to get the place I had to go through an application procedure and an interview, then they rang me up and told me I got a place in the competition. Needless to say I was fairly ecstatic about getting a place and I was the only person from the Republic of Ireland to get a place. After we got through the application part we had to come up with app ideas and send them off to the CTO of Kainos Tom Grey, I had about 10 or so ideas and for the most part they were quite good ideas. Many of them were applicable to the app store and were fairly unique. The app store being filled with over 400'000 apps so it is difficult to come up with a winning idea that is original and doesn’t have 20 other identical apps on the App store. Tom thought some of the ideas where great which I took great pride in because he is a very respectable man who work his way up by being great at what he does to become the Chief technology officer in a large and successful company like Kainos. To have positive feedback was a major boost because I was terrified. Irrational fears of being in over my head but everything went well in the end after all. Hard work will out! So they told us we would have 2 weeks training followed by 6 weeks of development.

So everything went well and I headed off to Belfast on the 26th of june the day before I was supposed to start. there were many many hurdles in getting to Belfast between finance, transport, place to stay etc which all got worked out even though some were a very close call. App Camp started on the 27th in Queens University Belfast and boy was it something. We had 2 brilliant lecturers Luke McNeice and Tomasz Janeczko who are software engineers in Kainos itself. It is nice to work with incredible people but we were really put through our paces in my view. I thought it was going to be very hard but I couldn’t have anticipated how hard the first would be. We had to learn a new programming language(objective c), new tools (XCode) on an unfamiliar operating system OSX. I felt like they really had thrown us in at the deep end. By the 3rd day we had made simple games and learned a good amount of the language. I learned more in that first week than I think I have ever learned in one week in my life. It was so intense but you really just had to soldier on through it. I couldn’t give up. I had invested too heavily in it to just give up and go home and at the same time my need to learn was telling me just keep going you will get through it. and I did. I did quite well too, we had 2 mini competitions the first was to create a game, my partner and I created just a simple black jack game and people voted our app to second place which was great and in the 2nd week we had to create a Restaurant app and my team was voted first. I'm not too sure if the 2nd week was easier or I just knew everything a lot better but I was doing well.

 

After the 2 weeks of training we got a week off for the 12th in the north. I had nothing to do in Belfast and my family was annoying me to come home for a visit so I did, I had a boring week but the R&R was nice since I was fairly wrecked after the 2 weeks of training.  I got to see some of my friends and headed back to Belfast on the Saturday before we were due back.

So now I have finally gotten onto this week. Week one of development is basically design week. We are designing UI(user interfaces) and other design based things that all engineers need to look at before they start a project. We have had 2 presentations this week and presentation is something I have had to work hard on this past year in college. I had to do many and I think I am finally getting used of them. No more butterflies is great. I am building stuff to try and get the word out there which is why I am finally getting around to blogging. Today I also have to set up a Facebook, Twitter and Google plus account to try and have lots of places to get in contact with potential users and hopefully get some constructive feedback from them as I go along. If you have managed to get through this entire blog post so far I say well done. I will have shorter ones from now on this is just catch up really. In the next I hope to explain what I will be doing for the week 5 weeks before I go back to Sligo to college. Please subscribe.