This week is the week I am most excited for. We are learning about maps and core location, both of which are critical to know when making apps. Today we started with MapKit and apple has already done a lot of the work for us. Within a few short steps, we can have a working map of the world and drop “pins” anywhere onto it. Today we used more JSON data and I am starting to get familiar with it and its syntax. On a lot of job applications I have seen so far they are looking for people who are well versed using JSON data so I am going to continue to work on my skills in this area more and more.
I learned a cool trick today that for placeholder text when setting a label or something put your variable first and then do ?: “Placeholder Text” this will set the text to “Placeholder Text” if the variable is nil. Pretty cool. Fast enumeration is going to be used a lot I believe and I am trying to practice with it as much as possible. Fast enumeration allows us to take an array or dictionary of objects and display them on a large scale, like a bunch of individual items on a whole map, by retrieving their longitude and latitude.We can create new objects each time when going through an array or dictionary.
Today I really dug into the documentation that apple provides and I learned a bunch. I am going to make it a goal to read the documentation first on my own before going to sites like stack overflow. Tomorrow is going to be awesome dealing with Core Location and I am really excited.
-Blake
blakeericmitchell 