Not completely gone yet

There I go again, just when I start writing regularly again, I neglect my blog and completely forget about it. Ah well.

Learning ObjC on hold for a few days

Well this is frustrating. I’ve been too tied up with work (both teaching and trying to figure out how to finish up my work proposal for this Friday) to continue with my studying in the past week. To boot (although I’m not complaining about it), I’ve got a few things to do with BCIT which is also due by end of week.

Sigh. I guess I could wait until the weekend, but then Father’s Day is coming up and I would like to spend Sunday with my dad. This is truly painful. Originally my goal was to complete the ObjC book by the end of the month, but I’m running out of time.

To add to my aggravation today, I found out that Radiant Communications tried to process a year’s worth of hosting charges for my website on my credit card. Good thing my card expired, and I have a new expiry date (hah! FOILED!). I don’t have a problem with the whole idea of convenience, but in this case I think this is Radiant’s sheisty way of locking me in before I even have a chance to say anything. I really resent that. They could have at least had the COURTESY to give me a couple weeks of warning so that I can decide whether to renew. You know, the domain registrars I deal with give me a MONTH to renew ahead of time. And domain names are cheap! On top of this annoyance, I tried to call Radiant, and after an eternity of being on hold with stupid music, I was redirected to fricken voice mail. OMG. I’ve decided I don’t want to do business with people that don’t give a shit about proper, fair customer service.

My deadline for finishing that ObjC book: June 30

I haven’t had a chance to continue my reading since my last post, but I’m determined to finish it by the end of June. After that, I’m going to have to find more resources on Cocoa, although it looks like the iPhone developers site has pretty much everything I’ll need. I also still have to watch all of the iTunes Stanford lectures I downloaded about iPhone development. If all goes well, I should be on my way to creating my first app in July.

A quarter of the way there…

A week after I cracked open the Objective-C book, I am happy to say I made it a quarter of the way through. Not bad considering I’ve been really busy all week, and can only squeeze my reading in the evenings just before bed. Of course it’s only really basic stuff so far, but still it feels good to know I’m making progress.

I think my note-taking method is working really well so far. I’m really loving Evernote as a study tool. In addition to writing all my notes in Evernote (I paid for a premium subscription), I’m pasting in screenshots of my code exercises using Jing — and I can search for specific text within the images. I only wish the text editor in Evernote was more powerful.

Finally, I know why buttonMode doesn’t always show the hand cursor in AS3 – curse you mouseChildren!

After a long time coding in AS3, you’d think I would have known this by now. But no, I’m too lazy to look it up.

I’m coding a new Flash activity (it’s so dinky that I shouldn’t really call it that) where I’ve got a movieclip that I would like users to click. I usually have dynamic text sitting on top of clickable items, but the text field always obscures the movieclip underneath so that the hand cursor does not appear even if I have buttonMode set to true. I’ve never bothered to work this out since this is usually not a big problem. Not good for the user of course.

So I finally looked it up and found a couple of useful discussions around this (http://blog.ickydime.com/2008/04/mouseenabled-vs-mousechildren.html and http://www.actionscript.org/forums/archive/index.php3/t-140973.html).

Turns out the solution is dead simple. Just set the movieclip’s mouseChildren property to false. Damn, I feel stupid now.