Unexpected happened! :-) After my success with Java, Android and WPF I pushed even harder.
When I tried Objective-C for the first time, I failed rather quickly. The syntax was incomprehensible to me. A lot of square brackets, strange flow (segues) between pages, tons of new methods. Total mess.
So yet again kinda knew what I’m going to expect, so I was able to brace myself. I started with a Storyboard, which went nicely. I watched some YouTube howtos and created a UITableView. Then I discovered prepareForSegue method to do stuff between screens. I had very rough Quiky app without pretty much having a sense what I’m doing. Strange was it somehow worked.
Working with header files and pointers was a nice throwback to my beginnings with Borland C++ back in the late 90’s.
I learned little more about basic stuff, like properties, interfaces, built-in methods and after 3 days I started to grab the basic concept. It wasn’t that different from C#, PHP or Java after all – just different syntax, but the same approach.
Instead of someObj.something(param) it's just [someObj something:param]. On the downside, string concatenation takes much more space, because instead of str1 + str2 it's [str1 stringByAppendingString:str2];
My biggest issue was I quite often edited a wrong .m file. What a loser! :-)
Anyway, Quiky for iPhone is approaching nicely, I think I may be able to release it in the beginning of May 2014, hopefully with Quiky for Android. Apple app review takes a week or two, so it gives me some time to work on Android, which takes just a couple of hours to publish.
It looks I made the roadmap just fine. Second release is ready and there’s still a day to go. Well, there’s nothing to wait for, more time for v3 :)
I have to say, over the past few weeks I quite fell in love with WPF. It’s like WinForms, that has all it’s things sorted out, kinda grown up. All those class names make sense and are consistent throughout the framework (I’m talking especially about controls).
Until I came across WebBrowser customizations. In WinForms it was simple and straightforward, so I assumed this will be the same, but better. Well, I was wrong. When I tried to assign any kind of event in mshtml/DOM, the WebBrowser froze. Yes, the event has been processed, but I was unable to select text or scroll the page. Useless! I didn’t find anything, that helps – not even in solution, that described exactly my problem about mouse lockups.
I started research to replace default IE WebBrowser with e.g. WebKit. There are some nice stuff, like WebKit.NET, Awesomium or GeckoFX. I understand that browser is a big deal, but I don’t want to ship my tiny app with at least 30 MB in browser DLLs.
I had a strange feeling about the solution mentioned before, because I noticed in the HUGE discussion below the article that people thanks the author, so it should work. But it didn’t. This time I was more stubborn and kept on reading posts.
Finally I reached one post, that points out the author forgot to put “[ComVisible(true)]“ above one class, which solved my problem and it started to work. Phew!
In many, many solutions I found, that this is not expected behavior, it’s in the WPF framework since the dawn of time, but Microsoft apparently don’t care. Sucks!
As I wrote before, when I started to re-create Quiky in WPF, I defined a feature set for the first release. And because everything I wanted has been made and greatly tested, now it’s time for public release.
You can download the app from Quiky.net.
I decided to reengineer Quiky, because I didn’t trust it in the worst way – that it will keep my data. I reworked the core code few times and probably left some bugs in, so here and there I lost my contents or replaced a page contents by contents from a different page. And for a text editor this is a severe issue.
I tried WPF, but it was really incompatible with all the stuff I put quite an effort into, so I started WinForms again. Because I had so much done, it was rather quick rework. But then I realized I added some unnecessary code and it got huge before I was able to tune the saving and stuff.
So I started fresh once again and when I reached the most basic state, I figured I can’t use those chunks of code, because I will fall into the same pit. And then I realized, because of this, there’s no compatibility issue with WPF any more, so I can wave obsolete WinForms good bye.
Also I decided to strictly make versions here (for me for the first time). To define a bunch of features to add in each version and to make a proper roadmap. My problem is to add so many features at once I got lost in the code and if I screw something up, there’s no way back. The very first version will be just the most basic functionality.
I had few failed attempts to make WPF app before, so I kinda knew what issues I’ll have to deal with. First of all, I used Panel a lot. In WPF there are four or five replacements. I chose DockPanel.
To my surprise the start was quite fast, even a LOT of things is different – like methods and it’s arguments. But it makes more sense, than WinForms, and I like it. WPF is somewhere in between WinForms and web, because of all those styles and XML definitions for visuals.
I also made a bold decision to use QetriX approach, so it will have e.g. DataStores. It really feels great to finally implement all those old ideas, I must say! :)