Friday, October 23, 2015

Reviewing Xcode for Hobby Programming

PHP is good for Web pages and fun and games in that world.  It could run native from Unix on the Mac but Apple's clear preference is for you to use Xcode.  Fabric, Twitter's development tool, connects to Xcode rather than PHP because the former offers project management whereas anything with PHP is one-off until whatever you're doing grows to the point it requires project management.

PHP is great for making things happen quickly without much hassle as in no project manager hassles.  However Xcode, in addition to the linkage to Twitter via Fabric, is also used for developing native Mac apps.  For example, this tool would be suitable for developing an application to run on an iPhone.

Apple wants you writing code for their hardware because you may have noticed they don't do that very much anymore.  They enhance what they have but they don't roll out new stuff too much.  In my view, that's a mistake but that's their direction and they want you to have a sharp programming environment to make the best apps you can because that makes you look good and it also makes them look good.  Fair enough.


Which comes to the latest brainwave for indie promotion and that's an app for yer band.  The only thing I've noticed of that promotional nature was a Kardashian app.  Unknown what it does but it demonstrates the principle of outrageous public spectacle because that includes any public, anywhere.

The first thought is to pull the Ride the Dragon podcast down to this marvelous Silas app.  However, subscribing to podcasts is less than breathtaking because the iPhone can do it anyway.  It could be worthwhile, regardless, as the immediacy may be worth some code.  It should be relatively simple code to write since it's task is to write the XML in the podcast, parse through it, and throw the links to the iPhone.  Have a nice day.

The disadvantage of the idea is my iPhone (sob) remains in Greece ... but ... this may not be a killer because the iPad has a compensation routine for when you run iPad apps.  So, it should be possible to test any potential app on the iPad without ever seeing an iPhone, or an iWatch either, for that matter.  I don't have any view toward writing anything for an iWatch since I've seen nothing particularly useful from them so far.  The biological monitoring is interesting in an Orwellian way but nothing much beyond that.


And the Xcode installation has just about completed.  So, we shall see.

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