Amplified Projects

digdog:

“Actually, Sheldon Has Better Design.”

If you’re an iOS developer, and love the scicom The Big Bang Theory, then you have to watch season 4 episode 12: The Bus Pants Utilization (original air date is January 6, 2011.)

In this episode, Leonard comes up with an idea for his iOS app and derails his friendship with Sheldon.

What’s the app? It’s a handwriting-recognition based equations solver, or in Sheldon’s way: “The Surprisingly Helpful Equation-Linked Differential Optimized Numerator.” The basic idea behind this is to use iPhone’s camera to take a picture of the equation, and scan it with handwriting recognition, then run it through a symbolic evaluation engine, and bam.

During the episode, they show several actual Objective-C code snippets and interesting design sketches on white boards, here are some of them:

You can see they have a CRecognition object holds an UIImage instance variable, and sadly they are naming it _Photo (with underline as prefix), it’s not the naming convention Apple suggested.

The next morning, Sheldon started his own design, if you look closer, it’s much more considered than Leonard’s.

For example, since this is an utility app, Sheldon comes up with a flip view design that similar to built-in Camera app. You can see a full screen SPhotoView with a snapshot button in the middle, and on the other side, it’s SEquationView and a UITableView at the bottom with some buttons.

In here, you can see more details. A UITableView holds the scanned equations, and supports rotation for landscape full screen detail view and portrait detail view. And on the right side, Sheldon shows a better understanding of UIViewController’s view hierarchy.

Later, Leonard’s team is doing some reference counting. Instead of accessing instance variable directly in -initWithPhoto: and -dealloc, they decide to use retain property self.photo, with class method to return a autoreleased CRecognition object, and claim there’s no leak.

What a mess, you should always use instance variable directly in -initWithPhoto: and -dealloc when creating/releasing instance object.

Here you see Leonard’s app class hierarchy, mostly C/C++ style naming convention for the class names, almost everything starts with letter “C” (is for “Class” I think), CAppDelegate, CMainView, CCameraView, CSymbolicView, etc. They should use prescribed prefix like “LRH,” which means Leonard, Rajesh and Howard.

The beautiful Penny next to Sheldon, and there’s Facebook API behind him.

In the end, Penny’s shoes app project. There’re many of them on the AppStore already, and her UI design looks kinda lame.

And Sheldon is working on this project…

Conclusion

I love and enjoy this episode a lot, and the TBBT crew dis a great job for all these minor details, they looks very convincible to me.

But, they should all use Mac when doing the coding, I only saw Raj’s MacBook Pro, and rest of them are all using PC. That’s not right, you can’t run Xcode on PC, well, unless they all use Hackintosh…

References

• The Big Bang Theory: 4x12 The Bus Pants Utilization
• Apple: Introduction to Coding Guidelines for Cocoa
• [digdog dig]; To nil, or not to nil, that is the question

This is freaking amazing!