New Toy, New Project

All of a sudden I'm finding myself working on a project that involves writing code for the iPhone / iPod Touch, thanks to meeting some experienced game artist friends of my girlfriend Tricia. On Friday I'm attending the Apple Iphone Tech Talk in Los Angeles. It's all a bit daunting -- not only have I not built a standalone GUI application before, I've not used Objective C, which is a highly peculiar variant of C. Haven't touched C in over a decade. Whoosh! Luckily there are two other coders involved who can (I hope) digest this stuff faster than I can.

In order to try out apps first hand, I just got an iPod Touch, which is quite a step beyond my venerable 3rd gen iPod. For one thing it has a beautiful color multi-touch screen. It can play back video. It has Wi-Fi. It has an App Store for getting new apps and games. And you can build your own apps if you own (or borrow) a Mac.

So far I'm impressed. There are some glitches, like album artwork not showing, but this is one sexy futuristic device. Makes my 3 year-old Sony PSP feel old, even though it too has a big colorful screen, and many of the same features just not so elegantly executed.