iOS programming and networked spaceships game

If you’re reading this, you might wonder. What this Rox guy is about here? It’s actually pretty simple. Apple has published a dedicated App yesterday for it’s iTunes University spin-off thing, which allows universities and schools to publish their courses online (and most of them do it for free). So without thinking much, I’ve signed up for the iTunes U version of Stanford’s CS193P course, which is about iOS programming. But how does programming connect to spaceships you ask?

It seems that Paul Hegarty from Stanford University likes networked spaceships a lot:

“You’ve got the spaceship game and some other client (it’s a networkd thing) and some other client shoots your spaceship. Now the model has changed, because your spaceship took damage.”

If you own an Apple mobile device, have some object-oriented programming experience and would like to know more about programming for iOS, this course is for you. If you are an EVE player, you will laugh jut a bit more often, when professor Hegarty mentions his internet spaceship game example.

The course covers such areas as:

  • The Model, View, Controller paradigm
  • Objective C basics
  • Cocoa touch UI and various input methods
  • Multithreading
  • Persistence and iCloud

One question remains: is this a pure coincidence, or does professor Hegarty actually play Eve Online?