I saw this picture on Dave Mark's blog. Dave is a very talented Objective C developer. The picture really got me so I had to post it.

Enjoy.

What a wild month! London, Paris (loved Paris), and Barcelona, followed up with a gig in Philly working for the second biggest software developer in the world on their up front website, SAP.com. Before I dive into the limited aspects I can speak about SAP.com's technology I would like to point out the facet of SAP that has had, and will have, a lasting effect on me, the cafeteria. These people (SAP) treat their people good! Made to order sushi, made to order Thai, a Philly cheese steak that will challenge South Philly's finest and a Starbucks that feels like it was made just for me, all this within a short walk from my desk. Really, next to the BMW the Germans know how to do it.

Lets dive into my first day. I was sitting at my desk, after enjoying my oh-so-delicious lunch of Alaskan Cod; I hear this loud noise getting louder. Turns out it was a helicopter flying in with the American Co-CEO. As he gets out, much like a scene you might expect to see from Iron Man, he has a dream effect on me. He waves at the people there to greet him and follows up with a mock gun shot (I can only hope he made the clicking sound that goes with the mock gun shot) at one of the security guards as he steps into the Escalade, in my mind I say YES, awesome! I know right then and there I'm going to love it for my limited time here.

I digress lets talk about a website that needs to address more nations than a senator trying to get votes in NYC. In short, because this is all I will say and feel comfortable, they follow a Model View Presenter (MVP) development process in making their site. SAP's site addresses content based on what nation/region you are coming from all while maintaining a similar look and feel for every end user. Think localization is easy with .Net...not on this scale boys and girls! Now add a level complexity comprising of several teams in more countries than you can count on one hand, developing for this one site. To create a level of consistency across so many sites a template format was built and an engine on top of the .Net engine to address what should be displayed....this is all I will give up, but I can say it's fun and challenging.

Thanks to VML for making this small yet, incredible contract, possible.

The Problem:
I was getting a white screen with no data in a UITableView on it in the iPhone simulator.

The Solution:
I had my initialization code for the array in the the "loadView" method and not the "viewDidLoad" method

Explanation:
Don't read self.view in -loadView. Only set it, don't get it. The self.view property accessor calls -loadView if the view isn't currently loaded. There's your infinite recursion. I'm guessing UITableView calls a View [pretty good guess since "view" is in the name. :)] which in turn caused my recursion.

This was a stupid little error that caused me about 30 minutes of my life due to the fact I didn't get any build errors. A simple copy and paste moved me forward.

Update: I think it might be important to distinguish the differece between loadView and viewDidLoad. (below)

loadView is the method in UIViewController that will actually load up the view and assign it to the "view" property. This is also the location that a subclass of UIViewController would override if you wanted to programatically set up the "view" property. viewDidLoad is the method that is called once the view has been loaded. This is called after loadView is called. It is a place where you can override and insert code that does further initial setup of the view once it has been loaded.

Last night around 3:30am I was having a little trouble sleeping, consequently I picked up my laptop pulled up the most recent edition of Diggnation and hoped the wonderful drunk-tech humor would push me off to a restful sleep land. It worked! Then disaster struck, as I was closing the laptop on my night stand, the laptop fell off.  In slow motion I watched my laptop hit the ground and the backlight on the monitor break. Damn, I’m more tired than disappointed; I’ll address it in the morning.

I woke up in the morning hoping the laptop would have somehow healed itself. It didn’t. Apple store here I come.  $1200 bucks, ahhh no thank you, any other solutions I ask the genius dude. He gently says, yes, Mission Repair. Doing a little research I find them online, engadget has recognized these guys! Instantly a legit shop in my mind and they are based in KC, happiness throughout the body, though most of their business is web based mail-ins. I walk in and find out a good amount of their employees are ex-Apple employees. My lapy is in good hands. They quote me $400 for a new glossy screen, a third of the cost of Apple, I asked if they could fix it in the next hour, they replied with a warming, "yup." At this point I want to hug somebody, anybody really. Flash forward 10 minutes and Mission computer says they are out of the glossy screens, they can have some in tomorrow or they will install a mat finish for 100 dollars less, due to the inconvenience, making my total 300.  Done Deal. 30 minutes later I walk out with a fully functional screen on my Macbook

I will be working with Mission Repair quite a bit more for my out of warranty repairs.

When is the right time to use dot notation vs bracket notation in objective C, or should I not use dot notation at all? I searched around for information on this, read quite a few opinions, but this blog post seems to give an answer of why.  I quote the most important part; I suggest you don't read the blog post. The post is very technical and what you really want to know is right below here. If you need to know the details, eschatology does a great job at giving them.

Most important parts of blog post:

• Use dot notation to get and set objects’ state.
• Use bracket notation to invoke objects’ behavior.

Eschatology -- http://eschatologist.net/blog/?p=160

A bit of a dark name for a blog, but the name doesn't affect the quality of the post.