About..

Woodchuck Productions, LLC is a little company I started to do iOS development.

I had an extensive background in coding, but most of it was years ago in assembly language, machine language, BASIC and a little bit of Pascal.  I stopped coding and got on the management track where I thought I was very happy and content.  I was happy with that work and love it, but I began to get a little bored.  In addition, the creative side of myself was getting a little stagnant.

With the advent of the iPhone and iPad I started to think about how cool it would be to transfer all of the programs I had written so long ago (mostly astronomy and utilities) to a new platform like the iPhone and iPad, but that was a lot of work, right?  I’d need a good bit of time.  As the years went by, I stopped competing in martial arts which took a TON of time in training, and eventually even stopped training other competitors.  Now I had some time on my hands…..

The next obstacle was…where to start?  I wasn’t starting from absolute scratch as I’d coded before but I might as well have been due to the length of time and my in-experience with Object Oriented Programming.  Every book I looked at that was supposedly for ‘beginners’ began with a simple “Hello World” app and then jumped straight in to more complex stuff than I could handle.  They all seemed to assume you’re already experienced in programming with Java or some other Object Oriented language and are just trying to learn Objective-C and iOS programming.  Courses I found ranged from $700 or $800 up to THOUSANDS for a week or two.  I couldn’t seem to find ANYTHING for true beginners, which is basically what I was!

Finally, I ended up running across the book “Objective-C for Absolute Beginners” by Gary Bennett, Mitchell Fisher and Brad Lees.  It actually DID start at ‘the beginning’ code wise and stayed there, slowly working up to more intermediate topics.  Additionally I saw a reference to author Gary Bennett’s site, xcelme.com that mentioned classes.  Checking that out I found that there were a series of five courses offered that ran from ‘the beginning’ to fairly intermediate and advanced topics.  The best part though was that they were only about $90 a piece!  You got indefinite access to the classes, so you could take them again and again.  You could take them on demand or “live.”

So I signed up for the classes and in less than three months, learned enough to get my first app up on the iTunes App Store!  Can’t say enough about how much those classes and the book helped me.  So this site is to chronicle my development journey as I learn and grow, and also to provide hints and tips I discover for other more beginning developers since I’ve found that this is such a rare thing.  In addition, the site of course serves as a bit of an advertisement for my projects and services.  I truly hope though, that the site can help other aspiring developers to overcome their obstacles and get their products out as well.  If you are reading this site and have something to contribute that could help, please let me know!