Some
yard work, some app work. I've started putting stuff in arrays, so
there are a lot fewer discrete objects floating around the code, so
it's cleaner and less prone to error. And by moving logic to the model
object the view controller object now is short, and mostly says things
like "draw here", "move tile there", and is a lot cleaner to read,
because all the logic for defining "here" and "there" is hidden away.
The
model with that logic, on the other hand, is now more complicated in
V3. But not as complicated as the logic in V2, I've had a chance to
think things through, and it shows. Four separate draw commands have
been reduced to one, thirty two separate locations are now stored in
two arrays, and so on. "Write the first one to throw away" they say. So the new interface is really a silver lining to the extra work.
Still, I think Objective-C is a horrible excuse for a modern development language.
Friday
13
February
2015
Friday
- Warm and sunny.
More
app work. I really am trying to clean it up internally, and that's
working OK. I need S to look at the interface before I go much further
I.
This is a new-to-me office chair that someone gifted. They had cats, and so my cats were very interested for a while.
Thursday 12 February 2015
Thursday
- Another beautiful day. Lancaster does have them, on occasion. And they are predicted to continue for a while.
I
did about a 3.5 miles walk, in shorts and a t-shirt, for the first time
in about 9 days. The heel was still aching on Tuesday, very slightly,
so I waited another two days. It did well today, no problems.
Working
away on the app still. I got the model installed, and the card template
cleaned up, and some basic snap logic in as well. The version 3 is
simpler that version 2, but uses a lot of the same types of logic, so
that helps. But I'm trying to de-cruft as I go, and that slows things
down. Plus the weird Xcode errors.
Book #8 was Wicked Bronze Ambition (Garrett, P.I. #14), by Glen Cook. This was another in the Garrett, P.I. series, hard boiled detective fiction set in a fantasy world of Elves, Trolls, Humans and magic. Cook, oddly, makes it work.
Wednesday 11 February 2015
Wednesday - A warm sunny day.
I went over to S's for lunch, then a trip to Costco for some groceries.
App
work is continuing. The Xcode problems are persisting, and the only way
to get past them is to reset the simulator, close it, build clean the
project, save and close it, close Xcode, the open it Xcode, reload the
project and run the simulator.
Maybe I'll start a new project from scratch and copy-paste file contents over. I did import
a couple of files from another project and perhaps it also dragged some
hidden gibberish with them when I did. I wouldn't put it past Apple.
Tuesday 10 February 2015
Tuesday
- Another nice day.
Working
on the app. Things are proceeding, but now there are weird build
problems with the compiler complaining of duplicate declarations that
aren't, and the simulator failing to load. As best I can tell it's
somehow a problem with "build - clean" not actually doing a clean. Apple fails basic compiler implementation, again.
There was a super-clean option at some point, but apparently it no
longer works. Looking at posts on Stack Overflow people have been
battling with similar issues for years.
Monday 9 February 2015
Monday
- Sunny and warm.
The shoulder still hurts, but it's better.
Class was fun. The instructor lectured for about three hours, which is
more than our instructor last year did in the first six weeks. He knows
his stuff, but is very low key.
The students seem older and present to learn, which is nice.
We'll be using Adobe Flash
for digital stuff, but our first assignment is to do a hand drawn
flipbook animation, using a 3x3 Postit pad. We have two weeks, since
next Monday is a holiday. It doesn't have to be fine art, indeed the
instructor inveigled against that, as it isn't the point, which is to
get 120 frames drawn (about 10 seconds of animations at
classroom speeds of 12FPS).
I have Flash
on a disk, so I can install it at home on the PC, if I can bring myself to put an
adobe product on my computer. It's a bit like Adobe Illustrator, but
has a lot of animation specific stuff in it as well.
Book #7 was Dragon
Venom, by Lawrence Watt-Evans. This is book 3, the final book
in the Obsidian
trilogy, and came off pretty well.
Sunday 8 February 2015
Sunday
-Very nice weather.
I pulled a muscle on Saturday, in my left shoulder. I've done this
before, but it was particularly
painful this time, and I essentially couldn't do any chores or lifting.
It seemed like a boring day: no yard work because of my shoulder, no
walking because of my heel, no typing because of my hands. All during a spell of
70F warm sunny weather! I hate feeling so helpless.
Fortunately it's all temporary, and I can get back to things in a day
or two.
S came by
unexpectedly and pruned my trees for me, while I watched and picked up
stuff with my right hand.
She's planning on riding her bike to the office next week (as I said,
great weather!), and was testing it out beforehand. It has an electric
assist for those really long days at work, and those days when
Lancaster's zephyrs are present and wanted to make sure that the
batteries were OK after a winter of disuse.
She also reminded me that our class, 2-D animation, starts tomorrow
about noon.
In the picture of the week below you see a nearly monochromatic
rainbow. We saw this while driving down to Scripps Ranch last week. To
the human eye it appeared monochromatic, though there are traces of
color in the photo.
As you can see it was cloudy, and late in the day. The photo is taken
looking northeast, away from the sun. I think the clouds filtered the
evening light so that it was already mostly monochromatic, thus the
reflections from the individual rainbow drops only showed a primarily
reddish color.
Picture of
the Week Photo Notes: An
monochromatic rainbow.
