Cocos or not Cocos – Drawing fruits

I continue thinking about the pros and cons of making the Amino Acids app using standard UI elements and Cocos. What Color is This Monster? is essentially a similar quiz, and it was written in Cocos. I had to draw all buttons and bars but I had more freedom. But that was a game, now I’d like to make a scientific application, and the design can be different. For example, I can allow the portrait-landscape rotation. Making a scrollable table of 20 amino acids would be also much easier than in Cocos. So the first goal is to play with standard elements in Xcode and prepare main screens to see how they look. Is there enough space for all buttons I plan to add? Can I add both an image and a label to one button? Only after I set on the basic design and the standard UI vs. Cocos dilemma, I’ll begin drawing all pictures and structures.


However, I decided to finish and scan my fruit-vegetable exercises. I image-googled “xxx clip art” (where xxx stands for a name of a fruit) and tried to redraw it. Usually three-four sketches are enough to produce a picture resembling the desired fruit. Now I have banana, cherry, plum, strawberry, pineapple, watermelon, apple, pear, kiwi, grape, and pumpkin. What’s left? Lemon, tomato, cucumber, corn, carrot… I don’t know how many I want to draw (and I have to buy a new gel pen). Some fruits such as plums, peaches, and apricots look very much alike if I scribble them. Of course, they are just black-and-white contours right now and I’ll fill them with colors in Gimp after scanning. There is always a lot of work ahead.

While I was working on other important issues, my blog has received several obviously spam followers all writing about “earning money by blogging”. I always want to tell them: “Son, if you know how to make money by blogging, make money and keep it secret”. Hopefully, I’ll gradually accumulate more meaningful readers.