Re: Serious Questions
Re: Serious Questions
- Subject: Re: Serious Questions
- From: Deirdre Saoirse Moen <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 14:02:04 -0700
At 3:57 PM -0400 5/26/01, email@hidden wrote:
I do not understand how a person is supposed to get started with
Cocoa when there is little, and very often NO documentation for even
the simplest things.
Did you go through the currency converter tutorial? That answers a
lot of basic questions.
The reality is that there's a *significant* amount of time involved
in learning a modern application library and it doesn't matter whose
you're learning.
I just dragged over a pop-up button to try and figure out how that
might work--not actually connecting it to anything, but just to see
if I could get it working on an interface level--but after thirty
minutes of looking everywhere I could think of I'm still at a
complete loss.
Other than trying to add/delete items, what were you trying to do?
The inspector window went away and I could not figure out how to get it back.
From the Tools menu, select "show info."
The only thing I got to work was changing the names of the three
choices offered. But how do I reduce that to only 2 choices? Or
increase it to 4 or 5 items? Every time I turn around someone is
touting Cocoa as an easy thing to learn. For whom, I wonder?
To me, this seemed fairly obvious, even without documentation.
To add an item, drag an "item" item from the Cocoa-Menus Palette.
To delete an item, select Delete from the edit menu.
So is a couple of courses 25 years ago in Fortran and a little TeX
macro writing in the meantime way too little to start from?
No, Fortran is an imperative language and I tend to think of it as
being in the same basic family as Pascal, C, Basic, the Modulas, ADA,
etc.[1] and, to a lesser extent, C++ and Java. You may be rusty, but
you've got sufficient introduction.
If I go to the dark side will I find the same problem there?
Yes, but worse. MFC is not as well-designed (speaking as someone who
has had to use it).
Or is Apple giving the developer's tools disk to everyone who buys a
retail copy of OS X just a PR stunt? If I hang in there will this
dismal situation improve? Are the documentation floodgates soon to
be opened?
Let's just say that programming IS difficult and time-consuming and I
wouldn't consider it a bad thing if a few people learned that. :)
Finally, is it really okay to ask low-level questions in this forum?
You mean newbie questions? Sure. Ask away.
Because I have a ton of them! Or should I just give this up and
start a Cocoa Cult list for the hoards of wannabes like me? Sorry
for being so flip, but it's the only way I know how to avoid
screaming!
It's a free world, so you're always welcome to start a list if you
like, but feel free to ask any questions you may have here.
--
_Deirdre Stash-o-Matic:
http://weirdre.com http://deirdre.net
Macintosh Developer (seeking work): Will work for Cocoa
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
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