I was not too happy with the mix of disparate subjects here: AVFoundation, delegation, and segues. I am also disappointed in the sloppy coding practices employed. I really don’t think it would be too much trouble to teach error handling the right way, right at the beginning. Or at a minimum, to use proper error-handling code and say “This is error handling code. We will get into that later on down the road, but for now just copy it in” so people get used to seeing it and doing it. Instead, people get used to seeing how to avoid doing error handling and consequently get used to avoiding error handling.

It took me awhile to getting around to this next lesson; a lot longer than I would have liked. I was about to defect to working with Firebase, but I did not have time for that either. So when I did get some time, I came back to finish at least this first course on the path to attaining a nano degree.

This section was a little bit more involved, so it took a little bit longer than the first two at about sixty minutes. Not much to comment on here as none of the material was new or particularly enlightening for me. I did notice that my stop recording button is the same size as the record button. I’m not certain if the instructor added additional constraints on the image or if the instructor’s image has different dimensions than the stop recording button offered in the download. No matter, the button works the same whether it is large or small. For the record, I think the width and height have each been constrained to a size of fifty points. You can do that if you want your button to look like the instructor’s button.

Also, don’t drag all of the provided images into the Assets.xcassets folder. Everything that starts with “Icon” will eventually go into the AppIcon squares, so leave them out for now. If the instructors don’t come back to it, I will explain them here in a future post.

I have finished the first two sections of “Intro to iOS App Development with Swift”. Each section took me approximately forty-five minutes to watch, following along as I did so. Your mileage may vary, depending on whether or not you have Xcode installed and how familiar you are with it.

I am glad to see that the course has (mostly) kept up with the latest versions of Xcode and Swift.  This is especially important with Swift, because Swift 3 is dramatically improved over earlier iterations of the language. I was also pleased to actually learn some things: 1) Some useful keyboard shortcuts (that, had I been paying attention, I should have known already), and 2) How to quickly identify which user-interface elements are connected to bits of IBAction and IBOutlet code. Small things, yes, but at this rudimentary level I was not expecting anything really. I was also pleased that they demonstrated how things can go slightly awry and that this is normal and OK in the short-term and can eventually be overcome with a little thought and care.

Overall, a very good beginning.

I have decided to (re)attempt Udacity’s “Become an iOS Developer” Nanodegree program and blog about it here. This should be somewhat of a different take, as I am already an iOS developer. My odyssey begins now!

#learningSwift with @Udacity