Saturday, December 15, 2012

Made my first mobile app!!!

I apologize for missing the past few days, I've been really busy and had a super long day shoeing over 10 horses, but I'm back on track should make my minimum goal of 21 hours of study  this week no problem. Let me start off by saying I'm going to cut back on posting everyday to every other day. Haven't lost any coding passion, just to free my studying up a little. I'll just mention both days in one post.

I absolutely LOVE going to 'Open Space Hacker Night' in South Arlington every Thursday evening at 7pm! The amount of information I get to absorb just by being around so many really cool and really smart people is amazing, I leave each time thinking: "Holy Crap this is cool...I need to learn more and more!)" I really love surrounding myself with people who are at a much higher level than me, it creates an awesome learning environment.

My app is coming along great, I've been using: "Rhomobile Beginner's Guide" and have made the sample app described in the book. One thing I would warn though is, Rhomobile is an awesome platform, you can code an app 1 time and then have it be able to work natively with: IOS, OS, Android,Windows, and BlackBerry. Amazing, but there is one caveat. Setting up and installing the Rhomobile platform is a nightmare that should not be attempted by any beginner, once it's set up it's  a breeze to use, but you can easily spend 3-4 days working on installing, goggling errors and making no progress as I did.

Thankfully Matt at the Thursday night hacking group helped me with all the errors, and he said it was not something for a beginner to do on their own. Matt is a professional Systems Admin. So he knows what he's talking about. I highly recommend finding someone to help you with the multiple errors if you are going to try and use the Rhomobile Platform.

Now that it's working, I'm having a blast with this app. I feel like a kid in a candy store, every click is like a bite of candy getting happier and happier:) Rhomobile's Framework "Rhodes" is alot like Rails, it also uses the MVC so it makes me feel more comfortable using it.

I'm gonna' play around with this app and hopefully finish this book, then sometime in January make an app, for an Acupuncturist I know in D.C. Maybe make it, then go up to his practice to get worked on and be like: "Oh by the way..."- Later Josh Kemp:)