First, I picked up two books:

• iPhone SDK Development &
• Beginning iPhone Development

Turns out, I’m not quite ready for those books. But a peek at the first few pages in each told me that  my Ruby background would help me learn the basics of C, Objective-C, and my Rails and RubyGem API experience should guide me through the iPhone SDK. If you’re like me, feel free to buy them now. The tutorials for C and Objective-C aren’t long, and the books promise this will be enough knowledge to learn with.

So the next thing I did (which should have been the first thing I did) was find C and Objective-C tutorials:

• Learn C for Cocoa
  – This is enough C knowledge to learn Objective-C
• Learn Objective-C

I’m only up to “chapter” 6 on Objective-C, but so far the concepts are pretty simple. Some things I don’t like and other things I do like.

In C, variable types must be declared. In Ruby, that’s not the case. And you have to use type conversion (casting) to get different results. If you’re confused about what this means, the C for Cocoa tutorial should help. I prefer Ruby’s duck typing. It’s less to write and worry about. Functions have to be typed, too. Yech.

In C, you can define a function and implement it later or in a separate file. I think that’s kind of nice. You can quickly scan what type the functions return, their names, their arguments and what types they should be; all without the code in between.

In C, you can declare your own types! That’s pretty cool. It’s kind of similar to creating a class in Ruby.

In Objective-C, so far I’ve created a class and I had to declare the getters, the setters and the methods. And the methods just return the getters that are set by the setters. It’s weird. But it’s probably just a ridiculously simplified model to teach me how those things interact.

That’s all for now. I’m going to keep sharing as I go.

Please check it out:

http://www.neotericdesign.com/blog/2010/04/build-a-slick-portfolio-w-jque.php

That’s what this post is for.

So on to the nitty gritty details.

Start with the RESTful Authentication Tutorial:

Follow the README to install, but READ THIS FIRST to fix the ExceptionLogger error Then follow these instructions to fix the OpenID plugin error Make sure you get your recaptcha keys for the config.yml, otherwise failed login attempts will bust your application. Fill out the config & database.yml files accordingly, run your database create & migrate rakes, fire up the server and make sure it looks good. Cool? Let’s move on: Define the objects Let’s begin by pointing out what, exactly, we’ll be building this application around: Galleries of Photos that Customers can order with a private Account provided to them by an Admin who can manage the galleries and review the Orders, which are also available to their respective customers. I will go through how to set up the following models like so:

• Galleries
  • has_many :photos
  • belongs_to :customer
  • title
  • acts_as_urlnameable (pretty URLs)
• Photos
  • belongs_to :gallery
  • paperclip attachment: image
• Customers
  • username, password, full name
• Orders
  • has_many :line_items
  • belongs_to :customer
• Line Items
  • belongs_to rder
  • quantity, size, price

So let’s build the Galleries first:

Then edit the Gallery model:

That’ll be fine for now. Let’s add the Photos model with paperclip image attached:

Now edit the Photo model as such:

You should read all about the paperclip gem if you need more info on this model. Basically, we’re telling it to allow image attachments to the Photo model. Customers can be the RESTful Authentication Tutorial User model, just need to add a couple things here:

Let’s worry about Orders and Line Items later. We’ll have to add a cart, too. I’ll cover it, but it is all derived from Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails Third Edition

Run your rake db:migrate and confirm all is well. Delete the Galleries layout file so it uses the application layout.

Let’s go see http://localhost:3000/galleries and play around. Add a gallery and then go to edit it. This is where we’ll add SWFUpload. Follow Jim Neath’s advice for this.

You’ll want a photos controller:

The create method I use is:

I had no luck getting Jim Neath’s session fix working, so I put skip_before_filter :verify_authenticity_token in the Photos Controller. Bad? Yea, probably. I haven’t found a better way yet.

Add this code to app/views/galleries/edit.html.erb:

Which leads you to add the following partial: app/views/photos/_image.html.erb

We’ll worry about the destroy link later, let’s integrate swfupload. Download the latest copy of SWFUpload. Copy flash/swfupload.swf to public/flash (make directory first). Copy swfupload.js & upload.js (in Jim Neath’s demo app) to public/javascripts. Copy Jim Neath’s swfupload.css file to public/stylesheets. Copy Jim Neath’s images/icons folder to public/images.

Add this code to app/views/galleries/edit.html.erb:

Yep, a lot is going on there. Reload your galleries/edit page and see if it’s still working

Ok, so this gets you to a functioning online photo gallery. Up next will be adding user accounts, a shopping cart, ordering options, customers & paypal integration. Stay tuned!

For now, please find the source here: http://github.com/joemsak/proofs_package

And for help on your project, visit us at http://www.simplifyadvance.com