confused cat huhWell, it was bound to happen working on all the backend stuff today. Once I knew that I was reading the data in; today it was all about putting the data in a commonly accessible area; formatting the data for different calls; and then letting those calls bask in the glory of real data.

At least that was the plan. (Hang on kids, it gets technical now)

Originally, the data was pulled in at app startup using the call:

sendAsynchronousRequest:queue:completionHandler:

Then I moved that out of the startup system and into its own data management class. All was going along well, but I couldn’t get the shared data where I wanted it. So I decided to pull out the big guns. We call that “Gang of 4.” This is the bible of software design patterns. I reached into the tome (well, not actually; as I don’t really need the book as much anymore) and called on one of my favourite (albeit most overly used and accursed) patterns: The Singleton.

The singleton, is muchly like building a cookie cutter for a one of a kind cookie. You take great care in making a cookie cutter, which could make lots of cookies; but this one is specially crafted so that people will simply have to share the one (and only one) cookie it will ever cut out.

That’s when life got weird. Suddenly the call above stopped working. It didn’t cause an error; it didn’t complain; it didn’t throw a wild exception and crash the device… It just blithely skipped over it.

I tried wiping the object files and compiling fresh. That didn’t work. I tried changing and maintaining the queue. That didn’t work. I changed how the singleton was instantiated… Nope. Just weirdness all around. Sadly; I got to this point about 30 minutes before I had to leave to pick up my boy from school. (My spouse got the flu). I figured, Okay… I guess I’ll spend 3-4 hours fixing it more tonight.

This also would not come to pass because I also am deeply invested in the show “The Sing Off” and have been writing reviews and analysis…es…(plural?!?!). Granted, if you read this blog… which you are at the moment (take my word on it) , then you probably have noticed a few of those posts.

So tomorrow: I have to write my Sing Off review from tonight, spend about 5 hours figuring out why the API took a hike, and then gearing up for the penultimate episode of the Sing Off. Oh what a hard life I lead at the moment. Honestly, I’m hoping that it’s 1 hour of fix and 4 hours continuing to get the real data in the app.

Oh, and to those who said they’d be interested in testing once I get to the iPad; Please remember that iPhone apps run just fine on the iPad and you can test them early. (Yes, S… I’m looking at you first and foremost 😉

We’ll figure out what went kerschlump tomorrow. I’m going to actually try to get some sleep tonight.