viewWillAppear

This is me right now: http://xkcd.com/621/

I've tried updating my blog on a regular basis and I fail. I'm just going to not commit on any level. But I'll post what I learned yesterday.

I was working on an iphone project and I needed to check a property list to see if a value existed, if it doesn't exist, I need to slide in a new modal view, add the information I need, then move the modal view out of the way and update the initial view with the data that was entered.

I learned about viewWillAppear. Basically it is called by the delegate whenever this....here it comes..."view will appear". Imagine that. In this case, I update the view to reflect the new data from the user. When the modal view goes away, the new data is updated.

	- (void)viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated {
	NSLog(@"viewWillAppear in home table view controller");
	[self updateMiniProfile:[NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:@"Profile.plist"]];
	[super viewWillAppear:animated];
	}

view raw viewwillappear.m hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Seem's easy to you, but it's all greek to me still.

Starting a new environment

I have a wonderful opportunity to start an entirely new development environment. This opportunity came to me as I was at the apple store today and got a fresh install of an OS on a blank drive on an old macbook.

So I'm looking at this:
OS X v 10.5.6 - thanks to the genius at apple
Python 2.5.1 - installed with OS
Django 0.96.3 - matches the google app engine version, or close to it
Google App Engine 1.2 - Its what is available

And it works...

So I guess all it takes to get stuff running is a completely fresh machine. I had roughly 0 issues with this. All installs were seamless.

Back in the day when I used to play around I seem to remember environments being about 40x harder to install. This was trivial. Awesome.

Tomorrow I'll get Django and Google App Engine playing together.