I Am Not a Graphics Programmer

I consider myself a good programmer. I can comfortably chat about anything from high-level topics such as methodologies and architecture to the minutiae of multithreaded code and Java virtual machine idiosyncracies. I understand how to solve a wide range of scalability issues. I have a good eye for the subtle details that cause bugs. I know at least the basics of when one algorithm is better suited for a task than another.

Put me in front of a graphics library, however, and I freeze up. I've been doing some simple graphics work in my iPhone app — filling an area with a gradient, for instance — and it's been slow going. I don't have the terminology in my head for this work to come naturally. Transforms, alpha channels, drawing paths, blending modes. I might as well be reading Greek. And it doesn't help that Quartz, the graphics drawing system on the iPhone, is all based on C, a procedural language, instead of Objective C, an object-oriented language. It's been a very long time since I've worked in a low-level procedural language on a regular basis. (I will say, though, that Quartz tries its best to encapsulate the C code in macros that provide a straightforward coding experience. The graphics folks around me at Maxis think that it's pretty sweet, which makes me wonder what sort of libraries Microsoft gives to Windows programmers.)

Some of my frustration comes from simple lack of experience. I didn't used to know a lot about server-side programming, after all. As I do more graphics programming, I suppose more of it will come naturally, and I will learn more of the subtleties. But I've also never been drawn to that side of the coding fence. I like to say that I have no design sense. This isn't strictly true: I did the design work for Obsession With Food, and I've got some stunning quilt tops that I designed. But I'm always surprised when something I design comes out well.

Yet here I am, literally a one-man development team for this application. I can manage the architecture just fine — and it's pretty good — but there's no one I can hand off the graphics work to. It's just me. I speed through the object-oriented development side and slow to a crawl when I'm dealing with Quartz. In the long run, it's good for me to expand my horizons. But in the short term, the part of me that's used to quickly getting code up and running is growling at the long periods of time it takes me to implement the simplest little things in the graphics world.

Back to figuring out why my transparent blue is sometimes the only thing in the rectangle and is sometimes on top of the gradient that's supposed to be gone at that point. And why doesn't my grey rectangle show up at all? All this for a tiny-but-necessary bit of visual feedback on an already functional feature.