Looking through Udacity’s student forums, I think they should add another course that is devoted to debugging. They showed some promise in the initial lessons of the first course by displaying some common errors and how to handle them, but since then we have pretty much been left out to dry on our own. That is partly because debugging is very hard, and partly because it seems like every bug is a unique issue unlike any other.

Of course, that is not true. Bugs can be categorized, and basic general steps as to how to approach debugging can be described and demonstrated. The opportunities for practice assignments are enormous. And practice is the one thing that will really make a difference in how well a programmer can debug. It is so much easier to catch and fix a bug that one has already seen before.

I started building my app today. I learned a lot about sending notifications to iOS devices using Firebase. I learned a lot of other things about other stuff as well as I set up all of my tooling. There should be a course just for tooling included in the Nanodegree.

It is somewhat interesting to note that, in all likelihood, you will learn far more outside of the Udacity video lectures than inside. I think that to a certain extent, this is just the nature of the beast. Most people learn more by doing than by watching.

I have completed watching the lessons for this final course in the Nanodegree program, which means I have finished all of this Nanodegree’s video lectures. I still have the last two projects to finish: “Virtual Tourist” and my capstone project app “Steampunk Road”.

So it has taken me precisely four months to get to this point. Using my timeline for my final project, it looks as though it will be another two months before all of my work for the Nanodegree is complete. Of course, the duration from start to finish will be different for everyone, and especially different from mine if you are not working full-time and have an active family life.

Would I recommend the courses to aspiring developers? My answer would have to be a qualified “Yes”. There is much to be appreciated here, but there are also many faults. Be prepared to use at least one outside source to help you, or at least lean heavily on the course forums.

Would I recommend the courses to established developers? Not necessarily. Although you can probably learn something from the videos, the flaws in them are more pronounced to those who can understand what is going on.

I still have a lot of reflection to do for that final project, so I will try to post those here over these next two months (or more).

Q: What are you most passionate about?

A: I have no idea what I am most passionate about. I have many passions, including mathematics, physics, music, theatre, and computer programming. I am also passionate about my family. On any given day, one or more of those will most likely come to the fore.

Q: How might an app help?

A: Apps can help me explore mathematics, play with physics, create music, and learn programming. Some apps, like multiplayer games, help me interact with my family.

Q: Where are there frustrations or pain points in your life?

A: Time

Q: How might an app help alleviate them?

A: An app or apps might help me manage my time better, but I doubt that an app can provide the vast swaths of time to explore that I really crave.

I have found the information I need to make the “Virtual Tourist” app, plus I now know how to actually use the “Virtual Tourist” app provided by Udacity on Apple’s App Store, but I am starting the final course of the iOS Developer Nanodegree whilst also working on that app. Part of “How to Make an iOS App” is answering questions, some of which I will answer here and others which I will probably keep private to protect my intellectual property.

The first question is “What makes a good iOS App?” The answer is very much the same as the answer to the question “What makes any product good?” And the answer to that question is, “You feel better after using the product (app) than before.”

But that sort of begs the question, “What about an app makes you feel good?” And there are many answers to that question. An app that makes you feel good is probably:

• Simple
• Intuitive
• Beautiful
  • Visually
  • Aurally
• Engaging
• Entertaining
• Challenging (at least for me)
• Inspiring
• Tells a compelling story
• Humorous

And of course, that list could go on and on. Plus, the list will most certainly be different for different people. It might also be informative to list the opposites, to show what an app should not be:

• Unnecessarily complicated
• Unintuitive
• Ugly
• Dull
• Boring
• Unchallenging
• Uninspiring
• Pointless
• Humorless

“VirtualTourist” is supposed to be the app we create at the conclusion of this course. Like “On the Map”, it only gets the briefest of mentions during the course and none of the necessary resources are obviously available. There is an app from Udacity available in Apple’s App Store: “Virtual Tourist Portfolio App for iOS”. Unfortunately, and this does not bode well, the app appears to be relatively non-functional. It solitary usefulness in this course is in its description:

This app allows you to virtually tour any place on the planet! Simply drop a pin anywhere on the map, and instantly browse nearby Flickr photos. It’s like you’re there already…or something.

If you are still working on the earlier courses in the nanodegree, example “Pitch Perfect” and “On the Map” apps from Udacity are also available. They appear to be in working order.

Update! The “Virtual Tourist Portfolio App for iOS” actually works! You just need to use a long-press to drop a pin, and then you can tap that pin to see pictures from that area. Perhaps Udacity needs to add a course on onboarding?!

I just finished the videos for the course, and I have to say it is a good thing I already have a lot of experience with Core Data. This course starts off so cute and friendly, like a little smiling snowman. But that smiling snowman is at the top of a mountain, and as he rolls inexorably down the mountain toward you and his inevitable conclusion, he just gets bigger and bigger and rolls faster and faster until—BAM!—he crushes you at the end!

This is a common problem with many courses, not just this one and not just in teaching computer programming. The course author knows exactly where to start, and starts off at a nice leisurely pace explaining every detail and inserting interesting tidbits and asides. But then soon comes the realization that we need to get down to business here, and subjects get glossed over as we desperately seek to come to some sort of conclusion quickly.

The best example of this in this course is a tacked-on Lesson 6 in Core Data and Concurrency. This is a topic almost deserving of its own course, but instead we get one long page of text. No video, no coding, no quizzes … nada. I can’t be positive, but it feels like this was added after the course was already “completed” and someone discovered that—oops!—our Core Data stack has concurrency issues and we better say something about it.

Courses should be written backwards. Start with where you want to end up. Look at everything your students need to know in order to do what you want them to do. Then take each of those things as your new endpoint and work backwards from them. That slow, gentle, congenial, leisurely pace should be your ending, as well as your middle and beginning. Yes, you should challenge your students. Yes, there should be a learning curve. But no one ever said it had to be exponential!

As a fan of “Back to the Future”, I really appreciate the dramatic storyline setup for this course. It takes a while to get to the first “Great Scott!”, but they get there eventually.

As for the first lesson on the UserDefaults.standard singleton goes, I have no complaints other than the usual about how the video is using an old version of Swift and the text updates under the video give away everything about how to do the exercise, rather than just say “change all NSUserDefaults.standardUserDefaults to UserDefaults.standard”, etc.

Wow, that took quite a while. To be fair, I was away on vacation for two weeks, but it has been a whole month since my last post and I only just now finished the “On the Map” app.

I cannot yet say whether having access to the complete documentation for the project would have made a big difference in how long I spent on the app. I suspect not. There were a great many unexpected twists and turns, and I did opt to implement the Facebook login as well. The Facebook Swift API is not exactly something you can just drop into, get what you need, and get out quickly.

On to “iOS Persistence and Core Data”!