I downloaded the iphone sdk to work on http://code.google.com/p/learn-navi-iphone-app/ , and I checked out the code. I can’t build it, though, because I think the developer has to add me to the list of users who is allowed to build it. Or something. I looked at the actual code, sort of, but it all opens in different programs (interface builder? xcode?) and I don’t know what’s going on. I did stare at the thing that parses the dictionary text into code that the dictionary app can use, though. That’s cool. It looks sort of vaguely almost familiar, I guess, the parsing stuff. The last time I did anything like this was in cs170, in like 2003 or 4 or something, and we had a little competition to see who could write the fastest program that would give you the longest string that is repeated. I started with this: 2 counters that stepped through letters one at a time. One of them started on the first letter and didn’t move initially (I call that one the counter in the back) and the other started on the 2nd letter and stepped through letters. The counter in the back waved if the counter in the front found a letter that was the same one that the counter in the back was on, and if he waved that flag, they would both remember where they were, and then take a cautious step forward to see if the next letters in the sequences were the same, and if they were, they’d count how long that sequence was, and also it would see if that length was bigger than the previously recorded biggest length, and if it was, it would write down what the sequence was, and then it would keep stepping together, until the letters didn’t match anymore, then the back counter would go back to where it was (hmm…) and the front counter would keep stepping. The problem with this is that it had to step through the whole string (which was a dictionary) again for every letter in itself. What is that, O(n^2)??????????? Doing N, then N-1, then N-2, etc things, N times…. is O(n^2)????? I don’t remember how it works. I think I had found a way to do it faster, but I don’t remember, and I sure can’t think of it now. And I never found out what the fastest solution was. I don’t even remember if the fastest solution was O(n) or what–I only remember the professor talking about how he had talked about the insanely fast solution during a class I missed. Story of my life.
I downloaded flash and microsoft visual studio express c# to look at the nonoba api, too, because there’s talk of Na’vi scrabble (by the way that link is really amazing) (…really, I can’t believe how dedicated people are) (I am jealous of their dedication), and people on the forum suggested writing a flash game using nonoba, because it comes with multiplayer stuff all built-in already (game lobbies, score tracking, users). I’d never heard of nonoba before, so I decided to take a look. I’m not going to up and code Skìrapll right now, because I would have no idea where to start, and also, someone else is already coding it from scratch. Anyway, about nonoba: I actually did get the example code to work, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to edit anything. I edited the .as file in the fridge magnets example, but it keeps building the old one. Also it WRECKS my computer. When I start my fake test server, and then switch to flash to start running the “movie”, my computer refreshes the screen and kind of blinks constantly. It’s really bad.
I’m a babe in the woods.
The “LOL NOW I’M GOING TO LEARN FLASH” thing is a little bit futile (even besides the futility of LOL LEARNING ANYTHING), since flash isn’t supported on the iphone platform (…right? Uh…. right? Uh… I know it’s not supported in Safari on the iphone, except youtube, but uh….). Anyway my pipe dream number 123476104709174691874914969841076 is to gain enough proficiency (somehow, magically) to write (or contribute ever-so-slightly to) some iphone multiplayer game modules that go in Seze’s learnnavi app. And that’s a big undertaking, one I am very far away from. I want it to exist because when I take BART, I want to be able to turn on my ipod touch, and play pictionary with na’vi words with other people from the learnnavi.org forums, and maybe a “words with friends” clone, and/or group vocab quizzes or something.
Also I just want to know how it all works. Everybody else is doing it. Also I have already given Dreamhost my money and have hosting for a year (well, 9 months left, now), so I must hurry up and use it for something.