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Since my last post, which I recall being quite a rant. I honestly have not been on top of my learning. I blame the fact that last month I moved and am still getting settled, hell my internet isn't even live until Friday. I secondly blame the World Cup. Just like the Olympics, I'm not an avid fan of the sport. But when the big tournament is held every 4 years, I become all about it. Throw a little being in the bridal party for my friends wedding into the mix and that has sucked away all my programming time, even my gym time has laid waste side.

In a small bit of development news, I completed a project for my "class". It was pretty much a read and retype code job aka I didn't learn a damn thing. I don't know how this professor thinks the class can do the final project in 2 weeks, write your own app from scratch.

I already thought of mine, depending on how easy it is to implement, is going to be cee-lo [a 3 dice game] game where shaking the phone rolls the dice. Of course I probably would of coded the game I have in my the idea for right now, but I don't want it to be intellectual property of the school.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I planned on taking a class at my former college as part of their new "continue professional learning" department entitled simply iPhone Development. It is based on the famous Stanford classes which we're lead by Apple employees.

I figured it would be worth it in a few aspects, in order of rank.

1) End the class with a certification I can add to my resume.
2) Have a human being resource I can ask questions to.
3) Make me get started, having homework will do that.
4) Meet other iPhone devs between the teacher, TAs and students.
5) The class fee included the $99 Apple dev fee.

Well I am now 4 weeks into an 8 week class and I can gladly say besides #1, I'm incredibly disappointed. Hopefully when the class ends the certification does have some bearing, it really was the reason i wanted to take the class.

In regards to why I'm not pleased.

2) the "teacher" doesnt come to class, he does all his "teaching" online via a very archaic system called Moodle, the TA is in class more on that in #4.
3) I figured the class would start slow...but I would of never guessed this slow for a class half over. In the 4 weeks I've had class my 3 assignments were modifying the professors "Hello World" with a different background, creating an RSS feed reader in Dashcode [search youtube, you can find the how to in a 5 minute video], re-modifying your Hello World to allow it to be debugged on a device by changing 2 LOC...so yeah I haven't learned much.
4) Regarding the last assignment, we had no information on how to change our programs to run on a device, so I asked the TA for help. He didn't know. He had to look it up [or possibly ask someone else] and then email me later in the week. By the time his email came, I had figured it out.
5) This was just flat out lack of information or misleading information, however you can look at it. The class listed that it "includes student registration in the Apple Developer portal", aka the $99 fee. Well it does, but doesn't. I have access to the developer portal, however it's only 1 year and any application I want to send to the AppStore will go under the college's name as the developer name unless I make my own and pay my own $99.

Well that ends my rant, thanks for reading it. I promise more frequent posts from now on and more positive posts about my career changing movement.

On a sidenote, I bought a used iPhone for this class [and to use as an iPod] and at my job I'm on call so I have the work phone as well. So in my pocket right now is a iPhone [dev phone/ipod] , Android [my phone], Windows Mobile [work on call phone]. There is a blackberry at my desk too, but I'll just leave it there, it's solely there as a backup in case someone at work breaks/loses theirs.