Stafford

After a period of illness i was desperate to visit somewhere, and somewhere new at that. So today i went to Stafford and very nice it is too, you can't fault somewhere that has a windmill at its town centre! Naturally the focus of my visit was railway related and that included one of the class 92s in the new Caledonian Sleeper livery for sleeper trains between London and Scotland. Very nice it looked too though not sure why it was in a siding in Stafford but i wasn't complaining. My railway photos can be seen here.

Building my first iPhone app

On a rainy Sunday afternoon i finally got around to installing Apple's Xcode development suite on my Mac. My first degree was software engineering and i have done quite a bit of programming in the past (going back to my days on the Sinclair ZX-80!) though i haven't done a great deal in my job in recent years. Nearly all the programming i do these days is Perl CGI for myself, i have an on-line database of my book collection for example.

However i have felt like trying a bit of iOS development, i have vague ideas of an app to help people navigate the canals in the Midlands (canals being another interest of mine). So i installed Xcode then went through a "Hello World" exercise, the result you can see below running on an iPhone simulator. The app is very simple though is quite involved, its a bit more complicated than writing

10 PRINT "I AM THE BEST"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

on a microcomputer in Dixons and then running away...

When i have time i will get around to planning a canal navigation app. Time is the key constraint there.