What, Me Teach?

Yes, believe it or not, it looks like I will be teaching.

I've agreed to be the instructor for a three-day iPhone Boot Camp NYC Workshop that runs from August 14-16. Future workshops (both in New York and other places) are a possibility if I don't incite a riot or do a really horrible job teaching this one.

I'm actually really excited about doing this. The iPhone Boot Camp program is a great program and I'm looking forward to being a part of it. The ink is still fresh on the deal (I'm not even listed as an instructor on their web page yet), so I don't have many details right now, but I can tell you that this particular workshop is targeted at new iPhone developers who do have some basic programming knowledge (or, basically, the same people that our book is targeted at). So, if you live in or near the NYC Metro area and are interested in becoming an iPhone developer, I'd love to have you in my workshop.

If things work out well, I'm hoping to convince them to offer a more advanced workshop or maybe even an OpenGL / Gaming workshop in the future. Let me know if you're interested in either of those topics and, if so, where you live.

About the only other thing I know at this point is that I will be tweaking the syllabus that's on their website just a bit to update it for 3.0 and to match my own teaching style. Other than that, details will be forthcoming once I know them.

Mint Apps Promo Day is Today!

Min Apps, makers of Mint Nutrition, FallBall!, and Countdowns has organized a Promo Day for iPhone developers.

As a way to foster a sense of community among iPhone developers, they're giving away not only license codes to their own apps, but they've gotten several other iPhone developers to chip in promo codes as well. The only requirement to get the free promo codes? That you be an iPhone developer of some form. Codes are available here until they run out, so check it out!

Core Data - Determining if a Managed Object is New

Sorry for the dearth of OpenGL ES posts. Things are quite hectic now with writing More iPhone Development, and I'm not even fully caught up from the week spent at WWDC. So, it may be a little while before I'm able to get another substantive post out like another OpenGL ES tutorial.

Anyone working with Core Data may appreciate this short category I wrote, with some help from Jim Dovey. Curiously enough, managed objects don't know if they are new or not. That is to say, whether they've been added to the context since the last load or save. I've found this to be a piece of information I've needed a lot, so wrapped up the check into a category.

NSManagedObject-isNew.h

//
//  NSManagedObject-IsNew.h

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>


@interface NSManagedObject(IsNew)
/*!
    @method isNew 
    @abstract   Returns YES if this managed object is new and has not yet been saved yet into the persistent store.
*/
-(BOOL)isNew;
@end

NSManagedObject-isNew.m

//
//  NSManagedObject-IsNew.m
//

#import "NSManagedObject-IsNew.h"


@implementation NSManagedObject(IsNew)
-(BOOL)isNew 
{
    NSDictionary *vals = [self committedValuesForKeys:nil];
    return [vals count] == 0;
}
@end

Then you can just add these files to your project, #import the header file, and then you can ask any managed object if it's new by sending it an isNew message.