Sam Soffes open sources Cheddar for iOS • Hacker News Board

Re: Sam Soffes open sources Cheddar for iOS

#21

Post by delinka » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 11:07 PM UTC

carson wrote: post #19

As much as I love seeing example apps like this I think beginners probably need to be cautious looking at this code. Here are a couple things that concern me: * The UI is all hand coded. Not to start a religious war but interface builder makes supporting different devices a lot easier. * There is some hairy concurrency stuff going on like this https://github.com/nothingmagical/cheddar-ios/blob/master/Cl...

On UI: I cannot appreciate the opacity with which IB creates interfaces. I can't see at a glance what components and objects are related, bound, connected, etc.

That said, it's a fine tool to get you off the ground, but I'd rather see code and know how things are laid out than have to guess as I click inspectors, hover over connections, reference source files...

Re: Sam Soffes open sources Cheddar for iOS

#22

Post by aaronblohowiak » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 11:13 PM UTC

carson wrote: post #19

As much as I love seeing example apps like this I think beginners probably need to be cautious looking at this code. Here are a couple things that concern me: * The UI is all hand coded. Not to start a religious war but interface builder makes supporting different devices a lot easier. * There is some hairy concurrency stuff going on like this https://github.com/nothingmagical/cheddar-ios/blob/master/Cl...

Using IB without understanding how stuff is hand-coded is harder. In my workflows (solo iOS projects..) I have found manual interface creation to have less friction and less OMGWTFBBQ!?!? than trying to get everything working with IB.. not to mention that some properties aren't exposed in IB.

Re: Sam Soffes open sources Cheddar for iOS

#23

Post by natep » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 11:26 PM UTC

Excellent! I've been meaning to get into Emacs Lisp, so maybe I'll use the API to create an extension or lightweight alternative to org-mobile, with this client as inspiration. I've been meaning to do the same for Google Tasks (which I use) but their product and API is much more complicated and intimidating.

Re: Sam Soffes open sources Cheddar for iOS

#24

Post by hboon » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 3:59 AM UTC

carson wrote: post #19

As much as I love seeing example apps like this I think beginners probably need to be cautious looking at this code. Here are a couple things that concern me: * The UI is all hand coded. Not to start a religious war but interface builder makes supporting different devices a lot easier. * There is some hairy concurrency stuff going on like this https://github.com/nothingmagical/cheddar-ios/blob/master/Cl...

If you build lots of custom UI and animation, it's pretty hard to do it only with IB. E.g. with a custom component, you see a gray rect instead of how things are laid out, and you'd still need to write the custom bits in code anyway. Now you have the mess in 2 places.

There's also other reasons like version control, being able to copy-n-paste, using constants, etc.

Re: Sam Soffes open sources Cheddar for iOS

#25

Post by farhanpatel » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 9:58 AM UTC

Thanks for this.

Even though I've made a few apps It still is really hard to get an idea of how big projects come together. It can be hard to organize everything so it isn't one big mess!

As a solo developer I dont have a superior telling me "this is how the code is organized" or "when doing this. use this pattern instead". This is going to help me a LOT I'm not about to rewrite months of code but now I'll have a frame of reference of how things should be.

Re: Sam Soffes open sources Cheddar for iOS

#26

Post by flightblog » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 1:24 PM UTC

stevenbrianhall wrote: post #11

Just saw this come across Twitter: "What @samsoffes has built with @cheddar is amazing for a solo gig: website, iOS app, API, open source, blog, store. Many startups do less." - @bb After checking everything out and struggling with finishing up a thousand little side projects myself, I really respect the thoroughness.

Agreed. EVERYTHING is polished and complete. Amazing work for a single developer.

Re: Sam Soffes open sources Cheddar for iOS

#27

Post by farmer_ted » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 1:45 PM UTC

carson wrote: post #19

As much as I love seeing example apps like this I think beginners probably need to be cautious looking at this code. Here are a couple things that concern me: * The UI is all hand coded. Not to start a religious war but interface builder makes supporting different devices a lot easier. * There is some hairy concurrency stuff going on like this https://github.com/nothingmagical/cheddar-ios/blob/master/Cl...

That "hairy" stuff is a straightforward use of GCD semaphores to signal when an animation has finished. I just spent 20 minutes reading up on GCD and dispatch_semaphore_wait(). This technique is elegant rather than hairy.

Re: Sam Soffes open sources Cheddar for iOS

#28

Post by carson » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 1:59 PM UTC

farmer_ted wrote: post #27

carson wrote: post #19

As much as I love seeing example apps like this I think beginners probably need to be cautious looking at this code. Here are a couple things that concern me: * The UI is all hand coded. Not to start a religious war but interface builder makes supporting different devices a lot easier. * There is some hairy concurrency stuff going on like this https://github.com/nothingmagical/cheddar-ios/blob/master/Cl...

That "hairy" stuff is a straightforward use of GCD semaphores to signal when an animation has finished. I just spent 20 minutes reading up on GCD and dispatch_semaphore_wait(). This technique is elegant rather than hairy.

I just picked a line out of the area to point to. I'll pose a few questions that go into more about why I believe this is code that isn't straightforward and in general a bad reference point for a beginner:

* Can you tell me why that entire block of code gets dispatched to one queue then right into the main queue?

* Can you tell me what queue the animation completion blocks run on and why it might matter?

* Can you tell me what queue the network request runs on?

* Do you think the animation completes before the network request finishes? Can you tell me why/why not?

* What happens if the network request fails?

Re: Sam Soffes open sources Cheddar for iOS

#29

Post by marknutter » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 2:04 PM UTC

When I was learning iOS development I found it hard to find full, modern example applications out there in the wild like this to learn from. Does anybody know of any more?