Iphone Tutorial: Creating a RSS Feed Reader

Fullscreen Webkit animations are normally jerky and slow. Trying to do any form of complex graphics (canvas bitmap data for example) is a no hoper.

Overall phonegap applications (at least the ones I have seen) are just not as polished as native ones.

- Why do I have to begin every string with @? I know the technical reason why, and the difference between having it and not having it, but I don’t want to type it all the time.

- Every time I type CGRectZero as an argument, I think "the method should just assume I want a CGRectZero, and if not, then I’ll tell it otherwise"

- It's distracting to my thought process to surround everything with []. That could just be a result of not spending enough time in the language

- Typing the name of every argument becomes tiresome after a while. Auto-complete does help some.

- I don’t see it in this example, but I often see cases which alloc an object, set another object to that object (usually doing some data massaging in the process), and then release the first object. In ruby, it would be a single (short) line.

I think (hope) that as I get better with the language, many of those annoyances fade away. Looking at it now, I think I could summarize it all with: The default of objective-c is to be verbose, and the default for ruby is to be terse.

edit: the "alloc, set, release" paradigm can be found in part 2, step 1.

- Header Files: These are archaic and require you to repeat code unnecessarily. Don't require humans to do something that computers are better at.

- No Automatic Garbage Collection: On the ObjC 2.0 we have this, but not on the iPhone. Unless you are making a high performance game, there is no reason the phone can't handle Automatic GC.

- No NSDictionary/NSArray literals: [[NSDictionary alloc] initWithObjectsAndKeys:@"value", @"key", @"value2", @"key2", nil]; // Enough said

- No regex: You kind of get regex's in 3.2, but they are very limited. Regex literals are much more powerful

- Xcode: You are pretty much required to use Xcode and I don't like Xcode. Even if you use the "xcodebuild" command-line script, you still have to create the project through Xcode.

- Closures: I guess we will be able to use these soon, but it is going to take awhile for all the API's to get updated to accommodate them.

- No dynamic variables: It's handy to be able to shove data into objects sometimes. It's a hack, but as long as you treat it as such you can save a lot of needless code. (You can do this via the ObjC runtime, but it's messy)

- No namespacing: ObjC handles namespaces by prefixing class names. Blah, that is so 1978.

- Unit Testing: ObjC has the poorest excuse for unit testing out of any language I've ever used.

Here's the thing, there are two types of bookmarks: Daily and Archive. Daily bookmarks are things I want to visit often. I have a Tech News book marks collection, and other book marks I for Documentation, and one for work (amongst a few others). I keep them organized as best I can, and they don't get changed much. I use the browser bookmarks for that.

I also have Archive links. These are links I want to keep, but reference later. Maybe. Not sure. I want to remember them. I use Delicious to store that. But honestly, I haven't really used it for retrieval. It's also annoying. I click the bookmarklet, and it pops up a window, and takes some basic defaults, but won't just use any default tags. It's annoying clicking all those tags.

Then there is the other issue. I'll remember this article was found via HN, so I'll think HN when I think of this article. At the very least, I'll have it stored here.

Instapaper is also yet another bookmarking service I'd have to use. So, now I have bookmarks in my browser, Delicious, HN Saved, and instapaper. It's a mess.

Here is what I'd want:

* A bookmarking/archiving system that saves locally and to the cloud. I can use something like Dropbox or Live Sync to move the archive to other computers. The system really needs only save the links.

* I want to click the bookmark button and have it work. I don't want to 'install' a bookmarklet. Hook into the browser's existing functionality. An addon that adds another button is annoying as well. I have too much cruft in my chrome as it is.

* I want the service to intelligently determine what keywords to use. I want it to save the article. The entire article, pages 1 through 8 if need be.

As it is it's still easier just to trust search engines will find what I need or want. Most often, I can google my way to victory much quicker than I can find where I put the bookmark.

Anyways, these are just my thoughts on an annoyance. You might ask why I don't tackle this problem. The thing is, I just don't have any interest in doing it. So maybe someone can make this work like it should. I haven't found a solution that works like I'd want.