The Situation (Day 36)

Just a quick note today. Our taxes are all finished (mine were done a while ago; I had to finish my son's this weekend). Fortunately the unemployment situation this year doesn't change anything about our 2012 taxes.

Today I got my job search reporting up to date through April 13th. I spent some time looking at new job postings. I have a phone interview coming up on Wednesday, and there are also some potentially interesting new positions to apply for.

We're having some car repairs and maintenance items done -- eating a little more of our savings -- but it's necessary. I'm hoping our main food benefits will come in so we can cut back further on the amount of cash we're having to spend on food. It takes a long time for that stuff to go through -- I think it's been over a month since Grace first put the paperwork in.

This afternoon I worked on some iOS development. I'm using iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, 3rd Edition and although it is dated August 2012, it is already somewhat out of date with the current XCode. I can't really blame the authors for that, of course -- this stuff changes very rapidly.

I'm using XCode 4.6.1 and I ran into the following problems. First, by default, my project used the new "storyboards" feature rather than .xib files, which produced some minor confusion and wasted time until I found this discussion and rebuilt my project without storyboards. Second, when I did that, I lost a connection between the .xib and the view controller it was attached to, which resulted in an exception upon leaving initWithNibName. Fortunately I found a clue here. Google is a godsend for this type of thing since so many folks now keep a running log of programming problems solved, on Stack Overflow, on message boards, or on their own personal blogs. I try to pay that back a little so when I run into a programming or configuration error, and figure out how to solve it, if I think it's general enough to be a problem that other folks might encounter, I make a blog entry about it. I've gotten several comments that I helped out other people by doing this, so that's gratifying.

Anyway, the upshot is that I'm working my way through samples and have little demos running on my iPod Touch, that I can then tweak and expand on. That's promising. If I can get some more of this done, I might soon be able to argue convincingly that I can do basic iOS development. That's one possibility I'm working towards.

That's about all that's going on today. Thanks for all the good wishes and support!