Domithan.com

Before I get into this, I should mention that my passion lies in my programming. It’s my dream to be successful through the programming I do here at home.

Monday, June 21, 2010:

The Mac came today. After immediately un-boxing it and setting it up, I went straight to Apple’s developer site and signed up for the iPhone developer program. I downloaded the SDK (took quite some time, I think it was around 2GB ?) I started it up and…wow. I’m overwhelmed. Now, I knew learning an entirely new programming language and interface wasn’t going to be easy, but this is not what I expected. I tried a few different tests. The first few crashed or had errors. Finally, I got a basic “Hello World” app finished, and when you tapped an ‘ok’ button on the screen, the text changed from “Hello World” to “Hello iPhone”. Huzzah.

Apart from this I haven’t learned much of anything. It’s about 11:30 PM and after spending about 7 hours with this new computer I think I’ve learned only very little. I’ll be going to bed both confused and concerned.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010:

After work today I immediately went back to the mac. I spent a couple hours searching for easier ways of developing specifically games (as I could tell by this point I might need a boost…) and found out about cocos2d. I tried cocos for a bit. I got a sprite to appear on the screen. I tried to make it move and it crashed the app. I’m not sure why. I then set aside cocos2d, thinking I would give objective C another try. I spent a good 5 hours working on a table app tutorial I found somewhere online. Everything was going somewhat well, but then…after trying to run it after adding some new code…it too…crashed. I don’t understand why. There’s no errors. No warnings. The app boots and crashes. My frustration is getting the better of me. As much as I want to quit, I know it isn’t an option.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010:

Once again, after work was through, I got on the mac. I tried some more work with cocos. Once again, I failed. I spent a good deal of time working on it, too. Watching my app boot and crash over and over was absolutely heartbreaking. To add to my frustration of the app itself crashing is the fact that I have no idea what’s going on. I’m typing in the code but I’m not sure what it does, I only know that the documentation around the cocos tutorials I’ve found say it’s what needs to be done. I’m incredibly upset. I can’t stand the hours of work that keep resulting in absolutely nothing.

Thursday, June 24, 2010:

More of the same. The frustration completely takes over, I need to stop programming for a bit. After trying to calm down, I spent the evening mostly reading and trying to relax. I went out for a bit, too. Maybe it helped. A constant feeling of failure is still looming. I still don’t understand.

Friday, June 25, 2010:

I have a long talk with my father, who is the most successful person I know. He has always been persistent and has always succeeded, even when he was told by others that he was destined to fail. I asked for advice. I told him how much this means to mean, how much I would LOVE to be a freelance programmer for a living, how it would mean the world to me if I could make it a reality. He told me that this failure was simply part of the end result, that I need to be persistent, no matter how much I fail. I know that he’s right, but this code still seems overwhelming. I am inspired, but I am still confused and frustrated. I still don’t fully understand what’s going on, and I don’t feel like I’ve learned anything about it.

Saturday, June 26, 2010:
I had to work about 9 hours today, no fun. After getting home, I just felt worse about the situation. I wanted to program, but there were other things that needed attention. I needed to clean, do laundry, etc. and it was already 7:45 PM. My wonderful girlfriend came over for a bit and really helped out, she was very encouraging and told me to keep trying. She made me look at the original living nightmare and the most recent one I have done, so I could be reminded that I have come a long way. She helped me to clean, and then we hung out a bit, watched a stupid movie. I tried to program a bit in this more relaxed atmosphere…to my surprise I got something to work. It’s stupid and useless, it would never be something that got into the app store, but just the fact that I made something that compiled and didn’t crash made me a bit happier. The only thing that bothered me at that point was that I stilldidn’t really understand the code much more than a vague idea of what was going on.

Sunday, June 27, 2010:
It’s currently only about 3:25 PM, but something very interesting happened today. I started to understand a lot more than I did before. It almost seemed to come from nowhere. I was in the shower, just pondering the code. Suddenly, something…just sort of clicked. I think it’s because I started comparing how the code works in AGS to how the code works in Cocos2d. Don’t get me wrong, they’re not NEARLY the same, but the structure itself is just sort of starting to make sense. Now, I can’t get ahead of myself. I have NO IDEA what most of the functions in cocos do, or what they are for, and I still have to get used to the wild syntax, but I am actually starting to get a bit excited. I’ll probably add a bit more on this later tonight.

Monday, June 28, 2010:

Looks like I lied about that update yesterday. Here’s a video log of today’s stuff:

Tuesday, June 29, 2010:

Not much happened today. I went to work and all, mostly focused on what to do once the first app is actually finished. How to ‘get it out there’ and such, since there’s what, about 500,000 apps out there right now. I need to get some attention.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010:

More of the same really. Talked with a friend who is helping me program my first app-store worthy app. Feeling excited about it, which is always a good thing. Small steps were taken, I did some really basic pixel art fort it which I will probably playing around with some more tomorrow.

Monday, July 5, 2010:
Sorry for the huge lack of updates. July4th weekend was a lot of fun for once, instead of worrying about programming! However, now I’m back in the grind and concerned as ever… the people I’ve been working on with my projects seem to have all disappeared. Spending a lot of today just waiting on replies. Not too fun.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010:
Got a bunch of responses, joined tigsource recently, very cool community. Already talking to some new faces about art in future projects, and I can’t wait to show off what I’ve been up to with the app, it should be coming right along. Taught myself a few more things, spent several hours working on the computer today. It feels a lot better to work and know something is actually getting done, rather than not knowing if your efforts will end up just being a waste of time.

Monday, July 12, 2010:

Funny enough, despite having huge runs of bad luck and some nasty encounters today, I’m in a very good mood. Why? Because last night, at 3:16 AM I submitted my very first app to the app store! I can’t even BEGIN to list the string of nightmares that came before submission, I never knew SO MANY THINGS could go wrong! The errors finally stopped late last night (my heart literally skipped a beat when I got a version uploaded with no errors and no warnings) after a lot of debugging and …too much help from a good friend of mine. In any case, now it’s time to play the waiting game. Oi.