Quantifire

So today was a bit of a slog because I had to get some stuff back for a review I was writing for Staples. You can check out my latest review over at Staples Tech Hub.

After that I met up with some friends to discuss how I can help them with their website, online marketing and distribution. I’m only considering these guys now because I really like what they’re doing and the unique approach they bring to the table compared to other competing solutions on the market. Will be more of part-time endeavour to feel each other out, but I have a good feeling about them.

After wrapping it all up, it was nearly 3:30 in the afternoon when I tried to cobble something together. Then I drew a blank. I felt as if I ran out of gas for the day, because I had a hangout scheduled with a good friend of mine, Brandon Chu over at Shopify. Then a bit overwhelmed about knowing the mountain of work and learning I need to surmount to get ready for the Lighthouse Labs bootcamp I was admitted to.

Fears and doubt of taking the more practical route of going back to marketing or product management. But in my heart of hearts, I know I want to do this. To be able to dive into something and immerse myself fully. The other option would be not to pursue it at all. Then I’d be filled with regret, not having the opportunity like this pop up again.

It was great to reaffirm and remember why I wanted to learn programming in the first place. To build useful things and create value in the world. And maybe add another feather to my cap in terms of another thing I’ll be able to do.

I’ve come to accept that I probably won’t ever fit the mould of being a specialist. Like a TED Talk I recently watched, I’m more of a “multipotentialite”, “polymath”, and renaissance man. I still like the term “T-Shaped Individual” but, that’s just personal taste 🙂

Soo.. what about the app?

Okay, so back to the app. I didn’t finish an app per se, it’s more of a deeper exploration of UIPickerView.

I had the idea that I could create an app using UIPickerView called “Seasons”. It would have four images, one for each season, and leveraging UIPickerView. For each season, the background would change to a picture of that season. That’s it. Not sure if I was to use an image array or simply add images to Xcassets and call them in a switch or if/else statement.

It turned out to be trickier than anticipated because I’m still learning how to properly use Apple’s documentation to figure out how to use protocols properly.

In any case, I could only get as far as implementing  UIPickerView, with the colours, white, red, green and blue.

import UIKit

class ViewController: UIViewController, UIPickerViewDataSource, UIPickerViewDelegate
    
{
    @IBOutlet weak var pickerView: UIPickerView!
    
   
    var pickerDataSource = ["White", "Red", "Green", "Blue"]

    
    override func viewDidLoad() {
        
        super.viewDidLoad()
        self.pickerView.dataSource = self
        self.pickerView.delegate = self
    }

    override func didReceiveMemoryWarning() {
        super.didReceiveMemoryWarning()
        // Dispose of any resources that can be recreated.
    }

    
    func numberOfComponentsInPickerView(pickerView: UIPickerView) -> Int {
        return 1
    }
    
    func pickerView(pickerView: UIPickerView, numberOfRowsInComponent component: Int) -> Int {
        return pickerDataSource.count
    }

    func pickerView(pickerView: UIPickerView, titleForRow row: Int, forComponent component: Int) -> String? {
        return pickerDataSource[row]
    }
    
    func pickerView(pickerView: UIPickerView, didSelectRow row: Int, inComponent component: Int)
    {
        if(row == 0)
        {
            self.view.backgroundColor = UIColor.whiteColor()
        }
        else if(row == 1)
        {
            self.view.backgroundColor = UIColor.redColor()
        }
        else if(row == 2)
        {
            self.view.backgroundColor =  UIColor.greenColor()
        }
        else
        {
            self.view.backgroundColor = UIColor.blueColor()
        }
    }
    

}

I feel kinda tired, going into Day 14. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but since it’s long weekend.. I think it’ll do me some good to be able to head into the remaining 80% of this challenge with a fresh brain, solid attitude and in good spirits.

Okay, while it doesn’t hook into IMDB, Flixster, APIs or anything cool like that (yet), today I went through Bitfountain’s foundations course and completed something using tuples to draw the data from. It does only one thing and has data for a movie, but gives me an introductory idea of how to pull data from a tuple and display it in a view.

Check it out:

import UIKit

class ViewController: UIViewController {

  @IBOutlet weak var titleLabel: UILabel!
  @IBOutlet weak var directorLabel: UILabel!
  @IBOutlet weak var writerLabel: UILabel!
  @IBOutlet weak var studioLabel: UILabel!
  @IBOutlet weak var ratedLabel: UILabel!
  @IBOutlet weak var posterImageView: UIImageView!
  
  let dataRecord = (title: "Midnight Run", director: "MartinBrest", writer: "George Gallo", studio: "Universal Studios", rated: "R", year: "1988")
  
  override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()
    // Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.
    
    titleLabel.text = ""
    directorLabel.text = ""
    writerLabel.text = ""
    studioLabel.text = ""
    ratedLabel.text = ""
    
    posterImageView.hidden = true
  }

  override func didReceiveMemoryWarning() {
    super.didReceiveMemoryWarning()
    // Dispose of any resources that can be recreated.
  }

  @IBAction func retrieveDataButtonTapped(sender: UIButton) {
    
    posterImageView.hidden = false
    titleLabel.text = "\(dataRecord.title) \(dataRecord.year)"
    directorLabel.text = dataRecord.director
    writerLabel.text = dataRecord.writer
    studioLabel.text = dataRecord.studio
    ratedLabel.text = dataRecord.rated
  }

}

Here’s today’s bonus nerdWOD:

Inspired by my alma gym mater’s WOD from this past Sunday:

AMRAP 9 mins:

15 kettlebell swings @ 24 kg

12 kettlebell lunges @ 24 kg

15 kettlebell swings

9 kettlebell goblet squats

… I finished 2 rounds + 2 kettlebell swings.

Okay, to be honest, I’m kind of limited to the stuff I can really build so I’m reaching out to see what other things I can implement that can augment my learning.

I’m going to have to re-evaluate my day and figure out the optimal times of learning and executing. Right now, the pace at which I’m learning is much slower than which I can execute at. The stuff that I’m going through on Bitfountain is pretty dry.. optionals, implicit unwrapped optionals, blah blah blah. It’s important stuff, but it isn’t engaging me like the other stuff I encountered.. but I gotta power through this. I’m giving myself until the end of the week to finish up the Foundations course.

Much like the last few days, I’ve had to reach outside of Bitfountain to find new things I can learn and build in less than a day. Today after scrolling the Objects library tab, I happened upon the UIPickerView. Because I didn’t get to play around with it yet, I went ahead and googled something up.

While I could’ve went a bit further in terms of having the background image to change upon toggling the picker, like choosing seasons for instance.. I’m going to make it happen at a future date.

Here’s what it looks like and below is the code:

import UIKit

class ViewController: UIViewController, UIPickerViewDelegate, UIPickerViewDataSource {

  @IBOutlet weak var picker: UIPickerView!
  
  var pickerData: [[String]] = [[String]]()
  
  override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()
    // Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.
    
    self.picker.delegate = self
    self.picker.dataSource = self
    
    pickerData = [["1", "2", "3", "4"],
      ["a", "b", "c", "d"],
      ["!", "#", "$", "%"],
      ["w", "x", "y", "z"]]
    
  }

  override func didReceiveMemoryWarning() {
    super.didReceiveMemoryWarning()
    // Dispose of any resources that can be recreated.
  }
  
  func numberOfComponentsInPickerView(pickerView: UIPickerView) -> Int {
    return 4
  }
  
  func pickerView(pickerView: UIPickerView, numberOfRowsInComponent component: Int) -> Int {
    return pickerData.count
  }
  
  func pickerView(pickerView: UIPickerView, titleForRow row: Int, forComponent component: Int) -> String? {
    return pickerData[component][row]
  }

}

Okay, so today was a bit weird as I was working out of a new space at CSI Annex, which threw me off, but here I still am learning, so that’s not all bad right?

Anyway, today I stumbled upon a two different tutorials teaching the “proper” use of NSTimer. The basis for this app was from Ravi Shankar’s blog post, “Simple Stopwatch App in Swift“.  However, upon more investigative googling, I happened upon another post which felt a bit more “cleaner” in terms of how they presented the tutorial content

It was a bit of a roundabout way in terms of building the app. I don’t know why he decided to delete the viewcontroller, only to create another one in order to make all the connections. It doesn’t make sense to me.

However, on iOSBlog, their timer app made much more sense to me.

In any case, my general understanding is increasing a bit, because I’ve always wanted to do a timer related app, and this is the first among many others that will be using the NSTimer class.

This app stretched my understanding a bit more in terms of how to use the Foundation frameworks reference documentation, which is a first for me.  While I’m kind of understanding how to update the labels and use the IBAction functions (the buttons), there was the updateTime function that I pretty much copied and pasted in order to understand what moving piece did.

Here’s how the app looks and below that is the code:

import UIKit

class ViewController: UIViewController {

  @IBOutlet weak var timerLabel: UILabel!
  
  @IBOutlet weak var startButton: UIButton!
  
  @IBOutlet weak var stopButton: UIButton!
  
  var startTime = NSTimeInterval()
  
  var timer: NSTimer = NSTimer()
  
  override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()
    // Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.
  }

  override func didReceiveMemoryWarning() {
    super.didReceiveMemoryWarning()
    // Dispose of any resources that can be recreated.
  }

  @IBAction func startButtonPressed(sender: UIButton) {
    if !timer.valid {
      let aSelector : Selector = "updateTime"
      timer = NSTimer.scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval(0.01, target: self, selector: aSelector, userInfo: nil, repeats: true)
      startTime = NSDate.timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate()

    }
  }
  
  @IBAction func stopButtonPressed(sender: UIButton) {
    timer.invalidate()
  }
  
  func updateTime() {
    let currentTime = NSDate.timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate()
    
    //Find the difference between current time and start time.
    var elapsedTime: NSTimeInterval = currentTime - startTime
    
    //calculate the minutes in elapsed time.
    let minutes = UInt8(elapsedTime / 60.0)
    elapsedTime -= (NSTimeInterval(minutes) * 60)
    
    //calculate the seconds in elapsed time.
    let seconds = UInt8(elapsedTime)
    elapsedTime -= NSTimeInterval(seconds)
    
    //find out the fraction of milliseconds to be displayed.
    let fraction = UInt8(elapsedTime * 100)
    
    //add the leading zero for minutes, seconds and millseconds and store them as string constants
    
    let strMinutes = String(format: "%02d", minutes)
    let strSeconds = String(format: "%02d", seconds)
    let strFraction = String(format: "%02d", fraction)
    
    //concatenate minuets, seconds and milliseconds as assign it to the UILabel
    timerLabel.text = "\(strMinutes):\(strSeconds):\(strFraction)"
  }
  

}