These past two weeks started off somewhat difficult and then bam was just crazy. It was User Interface week.
I have never been much of a designer. I can take someone’s design and try to recreate it using code but then again I don’t have much patience for that. Others do and they are great and if you are one of these people I envy you. I’m sure it’s something that can be worked on but not sure where maybe after Lambda or during our next break this will be my new thing to work on but for now I am sticking with storyboard layouts instead of trying to do it using code.
This is how the sprint started off.
We had to layout the design of our app using code. This wasn’t that bad it was a lot like HTML and CSS. I was able to follow along and get some stuff on my screen. This was the same layout as a previous app we had worked on. It was pretty cool to see it all done with code. It was a tedious process but I got it done. This was Wednesday of week 10.
The next thing we learned was about animations and again not bad. I wish I would’ve tried the layout using code vs storyboard just for the practice but I didn’t and now I regret it. This is also going into my do later list. I wish I had more time now, but oh well just have to keep moving forward. This was easy to follow along with and to implement different animations. I like animations I just need to be creative about how to implement it
The hard week is about to start and I had no idea
Drawing with Core Graphics was super hard. We were assigned to recreate the Lambda logo using shapes or bezier paths. That was a disaster and took me forever to get it right. I searched and searched online trying to get some help the best resource that I found was a tutorial from Ray Wenderlich which can be found here.
I got through the first part of hell week only to get stumped by custom controls. Custom controls is allowing users to interact with your own drawings/shapes. I think I was unable to comprehend the custom control part because I was so stuck on the programmatic part of the project.
It seems like it would be so simple to implement but it wasn’t. I definitely need more practice with this. This is something I will be working on for a while
One more UI Project
Before moving on to the next Sprint I only had the sprint challenge to get through. I was not looking forward to this at all. I basically just wanted to get through it and move on to Core Data. From the 3 hours that we were given to complete the sprint challenge I spent 2 hours doing the programmatic setup and I was nowhere being done. So I did the best that I could and did the rest over the weekend. This has been by far the hardest sprint for me. I am glad that it’s over and I can move on. This is one area that I will have to come back to and get more practice on.
Claudia Maciel 