Learn Cocoa

It’s been a full month of full time development and I don’t think I could go back to writing apps for Windows!

So the last 4 days I’ve been actually writing my first cocoa app. I’m a professional developer and at first this language and framework was the most bizarre compared to stuff I’ve developed on the PC for.
However within a day or two I’ve fallen in love with the language and I’m impressed about what I’m able to do so quickly.

Some things are just plan nuts though. Like the ability to change the color of a NSButton’s Text. I know you should not do it but its a bit much to have to write 6 lines of code to do that. But then again it makes sure that you keep conforming to the standards.

CUZ IM NEW TO MAC my friends programming too,. but on a PC

I am new to mac and indeed learning cocoa ist very interesting. At present i am startking thins task! :)

I need to unleash the power of my iMac for various New Media-ish project ideas I have. And another string to my bow can’t hurt. I hope. ;)

Well worth it, Objective-C is a great language and you can have a lot of fun using it, not to mention the fact that IB and Xcode are brilliant peices of software!

Currently working my way through Programming in Objective-C by Kochan. This is excellent if you don’t already have a good grasp of c or object oriented programming. I am coming from a background in PHP, but this book assumes no previous knowledge of programming. Also I have the Hillegass book but haven’t used that as much yet. I needed some new leopard tutorials so I also signed up as an Apple select Developer ($500). I figure I will recoup most of that money from the hardware discount I will receive as I plan on getting a new mac within 1 year and you get a decent discount on one piece of hardware with the select membership. I plan to write a small app to test how well I understand things. My goal is to get one app of my own written to mark this thing complete.

It’s been a pretty long road, but a fun one. By the time I had gotten over the (steep) learning curve, I was having (and still am having) so many app ideas I couldn’t code fast enough to try them out. I think this is key – have some ideas of software you would use, and try to make them. It doesn’t matter if you don’t end up shipping it either, so don’t beat yourself up about it for too long (I did). While I’m still learning new things all the time, I think I’m over the complete noob stage, so I’m closing this ticket!

Everyone seems to be geeked about Aaron Hillegass’s book, and they should be as it is a very good book, although, there are others. Another great book that I haved worked through is “Beginning Mac OSX Programming” by Michael Trent and Drew McCormack. It’s published by WROX and the ISBN is 0-7645-7399-3. You can go to www.wrox.com to find out about it.

So, I began working as a stagist in a software house. Nowadays I’m developing a web application on asp.net and c#. Not too bad, I must say it. M$’s tools are pretty useful. But mac is my love, and I hope one day I will use more interesting and elgants language.