I’ve been spending a few hours messing around with the MapKit part of the iPhone 3.0 SDK. I was able to easily get a scrollable google map up and running pretty quickly and then mess with rendering my own content on top of it. I need to be able to place multiple markers around the map, but I don’t want to use map annotations for all of them because the pins just look horrible. They’re fine for user locations, but pins everywhere just looks bad, plus they’re only available in red, green, and purple. So, I’m drawing my own markers on top of the map and that seems to be working well for the most part.
Going to keep messing with it for a bit and see if it’s definitely a piece of the sdk I want to continue to use.

Nintendo just announced that they’re releasing a lime green DS Lite at the start of next month. I absolutely love this color. Why couldn’t they have released this color a year ago? I’m about to pick up a new DSi and then this color comes out. I can’t justify picking up a DS Lite and then a DSi, there’s no point, but it’s my favorite green. Wonder how long before they do a green DSi?

I spent most of today giving a training course on iPhone development at FullSail. I think the presentations and tutorials I put together were fairly useful. The purpose of the class was to take someone from never touching iPhone development, and some of them never touching a Mac, to getting a few simple applications up and running in a short amount of time. I covered just the absolutely required objective-C constructs and explained more about how memory allocation works as I went along. The whole alloc/init/retain/release thing is difficult for people just starting out to really grasp.

As nervous as I was going into this, I feel it came off pretty well. Now to get back to my comfy zone with DirectX =^..^=

I have to get up at 5am to head to airport for the trip to GDC, the Game Developer’s Conference in California. While I’m not looking forward to the actual flight out there, hate flying, I’m sure the trip itself will be a fun time. I’ll be posting updates to twitter while I’m out there, so if you follow along I’ll be posting about what I see.