my first foray into iphone development

I was looking for a simple idea to re-familiarize with C (been a loooooong while), and discover the intricacies of the Objective component of Objective-C.

Plenty of good documentation on Apple’s developer web site, particularly the introduction to Objective-C and the introduction to Cocoa to get more specifically into the Apple development world.

I decided to go with the universally recognized Tic Tac Toe. Something simple enough that I could get everything done from scratch, while being sophisticated enough to provide a good insight into the language, the tools... (and, yes, bring enough satisfaction to feel good about myself).

My son is a HUGE “Cars” fan so it seemed like a good opportunity to play around with Photoshop Elements and go nuts with a pic of Lightning McQueen... Very little time spent on design...

Nothing real fancy here. Pretty cheesy in fact: it plays a short soundbite of me saying their names at each touch... Gotta do whatcha gotta do to experiment with SystemSoundID!

The winning squares fill-up when victory is achieved. With loud clapping too. Real loud.

WORKING WITH objective-c and Xcode

It did take me a while to get used to the visually cryptic syntax commonly used in Objective-C. All these brackets and these implicit getter/setter declarations are confusing.

Also, the fact that no garbage collection is performed in iPhone OS means some consistency is required for proper memory management; something I never had to worry about before.

Xcode (Apple’s official IDE) is a cool tool to work with, I liked that the most important features stood out. I use Eclipse at home for Java development and, although, it is a great IDE, I’ve never used 80% of the options and it’s sometimes difficult to find what you need.

Below is a ZIP with TicTacToe.app packaged to be installed under the Applications folder on jailbroken iPhones/iPads.