A lot of change has happened in these past few weeks: I moved in with my girlie friend, bought a new MacBook, started learning Objective-C for building iPhone apps and moved from Dreamhost to Slicehost.

To be honest, I’m in love with Slicehost. Having my own VPS is like getting my very own pair of underwear, no more sharing with hundreds of neighbors! Within a few days I had an SVN repository setup and had finished writing a few deploy scripts. Not to mention, firing up Terminal for the Mac and being able to SSH right in was a breeze. My only complaint is Apache is a little bit of a pig.

I’ve tried a few things to help the performance but after further research I’ve found that that’s just the way it is. My server doesn’t get mass amounts of traffic so I should be good for awhile. An alternative that a lot of people have gone with is installing a lighter web server like NGINX, then using FastCGI to render PHP.

Now I’m going to talk a little about my journey so far in iPhone app development. I’m extremely new to the game so I thought i’d share how fare I’ve come, along with some useful tutorials I hit along the way.

I originally started watching the iPhone app development screencasts on Stanfords website. It’s pretty amazing how they record their classes and post them to iTunes for viewers at home to watch – along with code samples. After trying to wrap my head around it from just diving in, I thought I should take 2 steps back. Luckily, the next day my homie Ben Watts had sent me a link full of Cocoa Development resources. I thought this would be a good place to actually get a grip on Objective C as a language and to not dive into a moving train, head first – great visual, I know.

I went ahead and downloaded a few screencasts on www.pragprog.com on how to setup tables, add data, edit data and delete data using fields and table cells. This proved to be incredibly useful and the narrator (Bill Dudney) clearly explains what he’s doing at all times. The language itself is a little funky with all the nested functions but the screencasts did a good job of explaining what things are being fired upon running an application.

I’ll keep you posted with the progress of my first app!