Well, having come back from this last week it was absolutely priceless!

For the first time ever I have been able to create bloody good custom UI controls using the Interface Builder in XCode. I've also been using KVO programming to let the data model update the UI automatically without me having to get involved.

Seeing as I am now waiting for code to arrive from the other guy I thought I'd go and have a look at what's going on "under the hood" from looking at that I have been able to improve the speed and memory performance of the program and have found and fixed ALL memory leaks in the program (so far).

I also understand much more about memory management in general and so have been keeping that in mind whilst programming.

The best thing of all is that I'm really fracking loving doing this. I've been coding for about 5 hours tonight after coming home from work! Not added many new features but massively updated and improved what was already there.

AMAZING PROGRAMMING HIGH!

Is it possible to get addicted to programming.

Love it!

Yes. "Extreme programming" is a sport. Congratulations. You are now a "hacker" in the proper sense of the word

I bought a book called Programming in Objective-C by Stephen Kochan, it's really helped me understand pointers in Obj-C, and has reiterated how structures I already know (ifs, loops, etc.) work in Obj-C. It's also done a heck of a lot of OO concepts which I haven't really thought about since my first year of uni.

It later goes on to describe the Foundation framework and then onto basic iOS development. Best of all it's Obj-C 2.0 and XCode 4 ready!

I've got that one, in fact I had the previous edition and got the latest one for the new stuff Xcode 4 & OS frameworks (memory management changed again. groan). Genuinely good work they are.

Actually, now I come to think of it, if anyone wants a slightly out of date but nevertheless still very useful Objective-C book, PM me.

Jon

I've just finished Part I (Obj-C in general, not much about Foundation or iOS). I must say it's the best programming book I've ever read! I've learned so much from it, and relearned a hell of a lot!

Blocks still confuse me somewhat, or rather why one would want to use them, and how GCD uses them. Presumably one would use them for GCD, and GCD automagically puts the block into a separate thread?

iOS development is something I really wish I had the aptitude for. Not for commercial gain, buy more in the "how does this work" kind of thing. I've a couple of books on the subject, but it goes right over my head. I am amazed at what people are doing with the platform.

I think part of the problem is a lot of books either take you through Mac development then say do XYZ different for iOS programming, or they assume you already know how to program for the Mac.
It'd be nice if more books were aimed at just iOS, though I'd agree that it's worth learning both, as you can then have similar apps in the iOS app store and the Mac app store.

There are plenty of books on iPhone or iPad programming, which is all iOS. Although obviously there's a lot of crossover in the fundamentals. However I don't think you can really port apps between iOS and MacOS that easily. Not only should the UI be different in all sorts of ways, unless you're limiting your app to MacOS 10.7, quite a lot of the process/thread management is different for example.