Learning Objective-C with Treehouse

Posted on April 01, 2015 in Code.

I enjoy picking up new programming languages, and love the freedom to create things for different platforms. I've been wanting to learn to code native iOS and Mac OS apps for a fair while now, and have recently been using Treehouse to learn Objective-C.

Their courses are easy to follow, concise, and presented by people who actually understand the language they are teaching. In a few short weeks I've picked up plenty; taking the time to understand the core of C, then Objective-C, the Interface Builder, and build example apps similar to Magic 8 balls, Snapchat, and RSS Readers has exposed me to all sorts of parts of the iOS API.

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Bookworm - My first Craft plugin

Posted on September 21, 2014 in Code, The Web.

Screenshot of code from the plugin

This weekend I finished writing my first Craft plugin. During the move of my site from Wordpress to Craft, I needed to replace the plugin I was using to list my books from Goodreads.

The Craft documentation was an invaluable resource to me whilst building my plugin. It needed to be able to provide a settings panel, and to allow templates to call multiple lists of books.

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Hacking the Sony LiveView

Posted on February 23, 2014 in Code, Tech, Tinkering.

The Sony LiveView

This weekend I had my first success getting the Sony LiveView to do anything other than switch on and show "00:00". Ever since I bought the LiveView in early 2012, I've been checking in on the progress of various groups that have been trying to hack it.

The LiveView was an appealing gadget to tinker with. Nearing it's retirement many sites were selling it cheap, for example I picked mine up for just £12 from play.com.

With a little help from a python script written by Andrew de Quincey, I managed to get the watch running. I was able to control the LED, feedback button presses, and send message and menu data. I still haven't managed to get images to send, but it's only a matter of time.

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