When I started in earnest with the iPhone SDK, the most frustrating thing I found about it was Interface Builder. It makes it harder to grok what’s going on, particularly if you’re new to Objective-C and the iPhone SDK. Fortunately I’m not alone in that frustration and a few folks have been good enough to tell us how to do that.
Distractions keep you from getting into the zone. I find that voices, especially conversation, are especially distracting. Unless it’s something I’ve seen a bunch of times, having a movie or show run in the background is also distracting. Silence doesn’t do it for me either.
I’ve found that instrumental music, such as movie soundtracks, is a wonderful way to keep my brain entertained and help me get into a good flow. Even better, nature sounds (also called soundscapes) help me relax and keep my mind focused on the tasks at hand.
Landscapes is coming along pretty nicely. The first alpha is done. I’m building out data entry screens and working on handling location on the iPod Touch (more of an issue, but I can workaround) and compass direction.
GPS isn’t as accurate as I would like, but I’m making the fields editable. Right now I’m going with latitude/longitude, but will put in a conversion for UTM. Letting users select a preference would be ideal, but it should default to UTM.
I’m eager to use Joe Hewitt’s excellent three20 library for this project once the major refactoring is done and it’s a bit more stable.
