iOS nightmare

The last week should be relaxing since we’ve done our application and our client was satisfied. The only thing to do was let the real users try and get feedback. But as my previous blog said, was there something cool to do? Of course!

Currently the web version works well. But we notice that the speed on mobile devices is not that fast because of the limitation of processing power. We’ve tried some ways to improve the performance but it is still not as smooth as native applications. Then we’ve got an idea: why not develop a native version?

This idea was a bit crazy since it was already Thursday and there were only six days before the poster session. And we haven’t started writing the report and designing the poster yet! If we screwed things up, the result would be terrible.

As Prof. Ben said: sleep is optional, everything is doable. We divide our team into two groups. One group for the poster stuff and the other two people develop the native iOS application. Therefore Ziwei and me started building the application from scratch on Thursday night.

Ziwei didn’t have any iOS development experience and I just played with the iOS SDK for a few times. Therefore it is hard to evaluate the time of development and we were also worried if we could finish it. We finally decided that Ziwei did the navigation controller and I designed and coded the views.

Though our application looked simple, there are more than ten views, which was a lot of work. Thanks to the Cocoa Touch framework, there were plenty of tools that we could use to improve efficiency. I finished almost all views on Sunday, so did Ziwei’s navigation controller. Then we combined the views, the navigation controller and the network and storage part together - it was Monday already.

Finally it was the time of endless debugging. We’ve encountered a lot of weird issues but we managed to make it completely usable on Tuesday. We survived!