New Direction

After much deliberation, I think I've settled on a direction; Java.  I feel that this will prove to be a more immediately transferable skill to have than Objective C.  Though I haven't given up on the iPhone app entirely, I hope to eventually port whatever I end up with to it eventually.  I am hoping that in the next year or so more people will write iPhone apps in Java and I can ride those coat tails.  In the mean time I will focus on wrapping my head around object oriented programming and do my best not to treat my computer like an 8-bit processor. 

There are two main factors in addition to the perceived usefulness of knowing Java that prompted my decision.  First, of all the University texts I have lying around I no longer have my C++ book, but do have two Java texts including Java in a nutshell.  Second, the open source project, FreeCol, made the switch very early from C++ to Java and I've been studying their project as a model for my own remake. 

FreeCol is a remake of Sid Meier's Colonization.  I've admired how they structured the project, with a series of dot releases leading up to 1.0.  Each release brings the project an incremental step closer to the final product.  For example, 0.1 was just a ship on a map that could be explored.  0.2 added a bit better graphics and the ability to send the ship back to the 'home port' in Europe.  Further releases improved graphics/added multiplayer and eventually added an AI.

The other thing they have on their site is a track of the number of lines of code programmed over time.  The project right now is something close to 130,000 if I remember what I read.  I like the idea of having the count and will need to look at some way of including a line count into the blog.  I will also need to plan out the project into reasonable blocks (my own dot releases) that I can target and feel a sense of achievement when I hit them. 

Over the next two weeks I'll dig into Java, and hopefully plan out the project.  I will start towards a similar simple first release of an explorable map.  My current lines of code count is at 0.