I have been working away on my application for the past couple weeks, and by working I mean banging my head against a keyboard hoping it would do what I would need it to do.  Fortunately, today I had another breakthrough, albeit a minor one.

The best analogy I could use to explain it to people is that I am a child, learning a new language, and always learning more about the world, but I lack the necessary words to communicate.  The analogy stands in that I am constantly understanding how the code should work, but having the right code is another matter.  Oh well, here’s what I’ve been doing.

I initially thought I’d be able to make a simple application for my work that was based on an existing paper marketing tool we had.  little did I know it wasn’t going to be so easy.  At first I thought of including a lot of functionality, but as I worked through it, it made less sense adding all this functionality that wasn’t available in the paper copy.  In a moment of clarity, I realized, that I had reduced my scope, but also increased my effectiveness, and had decided, I needed only 6 or 7 screens to achieve everything I needed.

I was going to be working from a “home” screen with buttons that would lead to other pages.  SImilar to a website.  The majority of my experience came from building websites, so it made sense to me.  As I went to code, I knew I needed to work with the ViewControllers and I knew I wanted a tabBarController.    So, I started to code a tabBarController program, based on what I had done in the book.  I got my two tabs working nicely.  Then I tried adding a button to load a new page, and I got nothing but errors.

So, you’d expect that my breakthrough would be that I got it working, right?  Well, that didn’t happen.  What happened is a little perplexing for myself even.

I decided to add a navigation bar to one of the tabs, in fact, the same tab as I was having trouble with the buttons.  Why?  Well, in the Apple documentation about Tab Controllers, it is bundled with Navigation controllers.  Truth be told, i don’t understand how to take what’s there and make it into code, but at least it explained that they are all sort of tied together in some ways.  I assumed, if I could get the navigation controller working, I’m bound to get the buttons working.

After another 2 nights of googling and failing at Xcode, I was extremely defeated, but cautiously optimistic.  I was starting to understand more and more that I needed to establish my RootView and then setup alternative ViewControllers, I just lacked the understand how to do it.

Now, during this time, I did download some sample code from Apple and some other book’s sample code for doing this sort of stuff, but they used Interface Builder, and I was trying to avoid that.  While I really like IB, and I plan to use it ontText labels and buttons, I’d prefer to do as much programmtically as I can, including my navigation.  So, those files helped me understand the need to setup ViewControllers, but nothing about how to do it programmatically.

Then today I stumbled across a Great link at the iPhone SDK forums that explained exactly what I was trying to do.  I made a quick edit to my App Delegate, and voila —  A navigation controller inside the first tab!  Thank you DevTeamOfOne!

Now, the problem is the Tab Bar item name isn’t coming up anymore…. But, that’s for another day!  Tonight, I savour the victory of my navigation bar, the xib file showing up properly and no crashes.  Huzzah!

Another exciting post at Whitaker Blackall via iDevBlogADay about a musician who’s getting in the development game.  I’m impressed in what he’s been able to do in 6 months.  I think I’ve been at this for 3 months and I can just barely get view controllers going, and this guy is building games.