Re: Super Newbie
Re: Super Newbie
- Subject: Re: Super Newbie
- From: Moray Taylor <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2003 12:04:03 +0000
The last time I used REALBasic, which was a couple of years ago, the
Windows support was terrible, it barely worked at all even for the most
basic of programs, it's probably a lot better now, but if you want to
do cross platform development, consider AWT and java, the OSX support
for this is improving all the time, and if you take care, they are not
distinguishable from 'proper' OSX apps, thanks to Apple's rather superb
implementation. You can also run the AWT apps unchanged on Windows
(although Microsoft would rather you didn't), and many other
(Linux,Solaris, Irix, the list goes on...) systems too.
For the record, I use Cocoa/Java and really like it, but you would be
pretty much on your own when in comes to getting help, and there are
some Cocoa classes which do not exist on the Java side.
If you want to use Cocoa, do it in Obj-C, maybe use Java if you like
that sort of thing, but don't use AppleScript, it's painfully slow, and
doesn't really seem to be at home with Cocoa.
Moray
Thanks everyone for your help. Another thing I found is REALbasic,
which looks promising for cross platform development. Does anyone in
here recommend its usage, and in what context is it used? Is it mostly
used for RAD and such. I read one article on Apples site where a
developer of meeting software says he uses it to prototype the
interface, but I take it that he then goes back to another method for
real development. I was impressed how Apple took the aqua interface
onto my Windows machine for their release of iTunes. Is there a way to
easily do this, create an app for Windows that is the replica of a Mac
app? I would assume that you would not be able to reuse Cocoa by any
means, that you would have to port it somehow.
Thanks again
On Nov 4, 2003, at 9:26 PM, Dave Rosborough wrote:
A few comments:
1. If you're interested in books on Cocoa, search the list archives
(http://cocoa.mamasam.com/) for "Cocoa AND book" or something like
that. There have been some good threads in the past year on good
books for Cocoa. The only problem is that, to my knowledge at least,
there are no books released that include the latest version of the
Cocoa framework in Panther (OS X 10.3). Personally, I have used the
books from O'Reilly (www.oreilly.com) called "Learning Cocoa" and
"Building Cocoa Applications", and found them acceptable if a little
weak in some areas.
2. Cocoa and Carbon are frameworks, while Objective C and Java are
languages. Carbon applications are generally written in C++, while
Cocoa applications can be written in either Objective C or Java.
Most developers here use Objective C, for various reasons. For a
more detailed diatribe, search the list archives at mamasam for
"Objective C and Java" or something.
3. While it is true that Carbon was designed as a nice migration path
for OS 9 developers' existing applications, there are a number of
features of Mac OS X that can only be got at through Carbon. My
experience has generally been that when I say "hmm... can't find any
classes in Cocoa that do ...", it's time to dig through the Carbon
API because it's probably in there somewhere. Fortunately, a Cocoa
application can make Carbon calls, since they're just C functions and
Objective C is a superset of C. So while a Cocoa programmer may
spend most of his time in the Cocoa framework, every now and then
you'll probably need to make a Carbon call in one of your Cocoa
classes.
4. Applescript is definitely slower. I've also found it extremely
frustrating when trying to do anything complex. However, some people
really like it and for some straightforward apps, it is a good choice
(for example, writing GUI's for shell commands seems to frequently be
done using Applescript Studio).
5. Check out Alastair Houghton's FAQ
(http://www.alastairs-place.net/blog/blog/CocoaDev-faq.txt). It's
excellent, and it has answers to lots of typical "newbie" questions.
TTYL
DaveR
--
Timothy Johnson
www.jhnsn.org
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