Animal Artwork and More Languages in iPhone Spelling App March 29th, 2010
Patrick Stein

I just finished up some animal artwork for my iPhone Spelling Toy. I also added translations for Japanese and German (in addition to the English, French, and Spanish that were already there). After I double-check the translations, I will get it uploaded to the App Store.

If you have any expertise in Spanish, French, German, or Japanese, I’d appreciate any feedback you can give me about the words I chose in those languages. Would they be the word one would think of when shown the picture? Thanks, in advance.

Submitted small bug-fix to iPhone Spelling Toy February 10th, 2010
Patrick Stein

I just uploaded the first update to my iPhone Spelling Toy. The update includes two minor changes:

  • Corrected spelling of siete (Spanish for seven)
  • Corrected spelling of colores (Spanish for colors)

Today, I am working on adding animal drawings.

Spelling Toy iPhone App Released February 9th, 2010
Patrick Stein

I am pleased to announce, that my Spelling Toy for Kids is now available on the iTunes Store.

The first five respondents to this article will receive a Promotional Code to download the app for free! (Edit: all promo codes dished out… if you really want one and will publicly review my app in your blog, I’ll dig up another promo code for you.)

Features

  • Kid-friendly interface! Just pick the letters you want!
  • Guides your child to the proper spelling of each word.
  • Adapts to your child! Cards that consistently give your child trouble show up more often.
  • Support for English, Spanish, and French! (German and Japanese Kana coming soon)
  • Lots of words to learn (with more coming soon).
  • Three different skill levels to challenge your kid!
  • Exercise some or all of the categories: Numbers, Colors, Foods (with more coming soon).

iPhone App Submitted To The App Store February 4th, 2010
Patrick Stein

I just submitted my first my first iPhone app to the App Store. Once it is approved, I will announce it here.

Spelling iPhone App sent to Beta Testers January 28th, 2010
Patrick Stein

I am pleased to say that I just sent my first iPhone app out to some friends to beta test. I expect to forward it along to Apple for inclusion in the App Store some time in the next week or two.

At this point, I am far more comfortable with Objective-C and the Cocoa class hierarchy than I was even a month ago. I still think Objective-C is awful. You take a nice functional Smalltalk-ish language, you throw away most of the functional, you pretend like you have garbage collection when you don’t, you strip out any form of execution control, you add some funky compiler pragma-looking things (including one called synthesize that only fabricates about half of what you’d want it to build), you change the semantics of ->, and then you interleave it with C! Wahoo! Instant headache!

But, after I found the for-each sort of construction, my code got quite a bit simpler. A whole bunch of loops like this:

NSEnumerator* ee = [myArray enumerator];
MyItem* item;
while ( ( item = (MyItem*)[ee nextObject] ) != nil ) {
   ...
}

went to this:

for ( MyItem* item in myArrayOrEnumerator ) {
   ...
}
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