Learning to Code

I’ve got a project coming that requires some sort of mac user interface that communicates via bluetooth & Twitter (whew!).  Soooo, for the past few days I’ve been smacking my head against my laptop as I attempt to learn something new about programming. It’s been a looooong time since college when I learned Pascal, and I can really feel it as I wade through Java & Objective C. All those brackets!! Arrgh.

On the plus side, there are many websites that have been helping a great deal – here’s one of them. Cocoalab has a wonderful Objective C tutorial – “Become an XCoder” that walks you thorough the basics and even holds your hand as you make a simple OS X application or two. The PERFECT starting point for someone who wants to begin programming on the Mac.

Note though that the PDF version of the tutorial is a bit out of date and documents a now outdated Xcode. But the HTML pages have been updated to reflect a newer version of the Apple software. This is only important as you try to link various objects in your programs.

FLARToolKit augmented reality with Flash

While researching for a project, I’ve been searching the web lately for references to optical glyph tracking. I first learned of it while watching an episode of Prototype This. The project was to build robot boxers for a real-time match based on movements of two people who were “fake” boxing. They used glyph tracking in their system to convert their movements into robotic motions. Very cool.

Recently I found a link to a Saatchi & Saatchi website that lets you print out a special graphic so you can play with glyph tracking using your computer’s webcam. It uses a flash tool-kit called FLARToolKit which I haven’t looked into yet, but looks very promising as a starting point for playing around with the tech.