Re: Cocoa bindings
Re: Cocoa bindings
- Subject: Re: Cocoa bindings
- From: David Marshall <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 20:37:53 -0400
On Wed, 1 Jun 2005, has wrote:
Matt Neuburg wrote:
And if Matt or any other valiant listers are listening, can you see
the need
to write an advanced AS Studio book? I'll buy it in a second...
I'd love to, but so far my sense is that it's hard to justify from a
time-versus-money equation.
Yep. AppleScript's a pretty lousy language for 'advanced' application
development anyway.
[snip]
Half the book'd be spent on just dragging the AS language up to the
sort of level that other languages already take for granted.
I dunno. I'm personally finding AS Studio to be just about my speed;
the limitations you and others cite are, for me, more than offset by
the advantages of having the tools right here on my Mac, already
reasonably well integrated, and in the service of a language that, for
whatever oddball reasons, I've picked up reasonably quickly. (Maybe
that's more a commentary on my laziness, inertia, or lack of language
acquisition skills than it is an endorsement of this particular
package; I don't know.)
FWIW, I'd rather see a general 'cookbook' of Cocoa app development,
full of quick and simple 'How To Do X' demonstrations. Something that
picks up individual concepts one at a time and explains the basic
principles - what it is, what it's useful for, how you go about doing
it, and where else to find more detailed information. Something that
discusses both Mac-specific technologies like key-value binding, core
data and for general application design and construction principles:
how to plan an application, what MVC is for, etc. More like a set of
signposts to set folk in the right direction on key issues when
designing and writing their own apps. Lots of interesting little
snippets to illustrate points, rather than some interminably long and
tedious step-by-step tutorial to develop some complete-but-useless
application I've no interest in
I've banged my head against Cocoa just enough to conclude that if my
life depended on it, I could learn it. It's too much challenge for too
little reward at this point, though; in the time it took me to figure
out how to read the current contents of a text field, count the
characters, and display the count, I was able in AS Studio, by
contrast, also to implement a half-dozen ways of manipulating the text
(from palindrome to jumble to random change of case), and all that
using a language renowned for its weak string handling.
No doubt the silly little "apps" I create in AS Studio aren't helping
me develop any kind of broad competence, but they have certainly
allowed me to explore a whole range of interface design and action
handling techniques. There's value in learning to walk before trying to
run, even if it means using different shoes. Or to stretch a different
metaphor: building a model railroad won't teach you anything about
diesel engines and air brakes, but it will teach you to make sure the
switches are thrown in the right directions...
- - - - -
Dave
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