Its been almost 2 months since my last post. And it may have looked like I have dropped off the face of earth. But life interrupts. Especially if you have a day job that feeds the family and is no way connected iOS programming!
My first few days of Chapter 5 were going with full force in December/January but then I got sick and then I started loosing interest due to a debugging session that went on for a while and which is still the bane of this chapter's port. In the meantime, my day job's responsibilities started to interrupt my thoughts during my free time too and hence more delays. I managed to read up on some Box2D tutorials while I was floating aimlessly in the iOS world. What disheartens me is that there is so much to catch up on even to build a simple game in iOS (that is without the likes of CoronoSDK) that is fun to play with. I realized I have to bone up on Physics, Math and C++ more if I wanted to make something worthwhile.
In the meantime, I am glad to say, to motivate me further, I did acquire an iPad2 last week after the price reduction from Apple. Microcenter has at $360, lowest price you will find for the base model! Then began my next nightmare with Apple and its quirky development methodologies.
I have a MacBook with Snow Leopard (10.6.x) version and I found out the hard way that it will only support iOS 5.0.1 and below. So when I updated my iPad to 5.1, the XCode 4.2 I had complained that I cannot build for that device because it does not have 5.1 SDK and there is no straight way to downgrade an iPad (of course you can hack it but then you cannot use it for App Store). Now to get that I had to upgrade to Lion (10.7.x) on my MacBook. I decided against the upgrade in favor of a fresh install and backup/restore of Timemachine and lo and behold I forgot to make backup copies of my keychain private keys that maintains the iPhone developer certificate.
Lets just say the iPad is still sitting in a state where I cannot develop on it since Apple is having certificate issues on its iOS provisioning site today. Hopefully, I will get started again some time this week and complete chapter 5 to go on to other interesting chapters/topics. That is, if the requirements of my day job do not interrupt me again (which may still happen, as I have been asked to re-certify some of my Cisco and PMI certifications that I have for some contract bidding). Let see..
LOL, so Im not the only one with family and work commitments eating at free time.
ReplyDeleteGood luck, hope you manage to find the time!