On Jun 29, 2007, at 11:46 PM, Laurence Harris wrote:
There's been a good bit of discussion about Cocoa and Obj-C
recently, and how once you get over your aversion to Obj-C's weird
bracketed syntax that it's about an afternoon to pick up Obj-C. This
is consistent with what I've heard for years. What hasn't been
discussed much in the recent threads is that Cocoa, a complete
application framework, can*not* be learned in an afternoon or any
other short period of time. Cocoa takes time to learn. Writing first-
quality applications with it takes even longer.
It's absolutely true that Cocoa takes time to learn, but it's not like
it's *that* hard for an experienced software developer -- especially
one already comfortable with object-oriented programming -- to get
started with.
I've been programming on the Mac since 1990, and on Cocoa and its
predecessors since 1997. Almost exactly 10 years ago, I bought a used
NeXT workstation and installed the OPENSTEP 4.2 "prelude to Rhapsody"
release that developers were sent so I could get up to speed with the
API, and what I found was that the OpenStep framework and Interface
Builder were to software development what the Macintosh was to end-
user computing.
My skills with PowerPlant and C++ translated readily to the new
environment, and a lot of things were much more consistent and made
more sense under a single, unified API than they did under the
"layered" API that PowerPlant plus the Toolbox represented. (The main
revelations at the time for me were NSTableView and NSBrowser.)
My point is that while it will be different from what you're used to,
Cocoa does have its own gestalt and if you follow some of the modern
learning materials -- such as the Hillegass book -- you'll have an
easy time getting up to speed with the way it does things, and you'll
be building real, Mac-quality applications with it in no time.
For example, the human interface of an application like Larry's
FileBuddy would be relatively straightforward to build in Cocoa with
Interface Builder -- including getting the little behaviors correct.
And whatever representation makes the most sense -- whether C against
POSIX, Objective-C against Foundation, or C++ against Toolbox -- can
be used for the data model that the human interface presents to the
user.
-- Chris
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