“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”!