Re: Guidance for Cocoa's steep learning curve
Re: Guidance for Cocoa's steep learning curve
- Subject: Re: Guidance for Cocoa's steep learning curve
- From: Ilan Volow <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 16 May 2008 02:55:26 -0400
The NSTableView is based on the MVC paradigm which has existed for
quite some time. A method you implement gets called to return the
value for each cell (more or less). So if you have a table with forty
cells, then at least 40 times the method will get called. After I
started looking at it this way, the whole NSTableView thing clicked.
The NSTableView docs aren't too bad. Trust me, you haven't hit the
depths of Apple documentation suckage until you hit current
documentation that refers you to documentation written a zillion years
ago where all the example code is in Pascal.
-- Ilan
On May 15, 2008, at 9:33 PM, Joseph Ayers wrote:
I think what is missing here is some history. I'm working on an APP
to make a series of arbitrary measurements
(i.e. positions, distances angles, shapes) on each of the frames of
a movie. On some movies I might want to make
three position measurements, on others I want to make 4 angle
measurements, etc. Dealing with the movie and
indeed Firewire controlled acquistion and mouse controlled
measurement has been rather cool. What is absolutely
baffling is dealing with NSTableView. The documentation absolutely
sucks. How does one map table rows and columns
on NSMutableArrays and NSMutableDictionaries. How does one map the
Rows and Columns of a "dataSource"
on a NSTable view? What about records and fields. Imagine growing
up on Excel and then dealing with NSTableView.
How did this Cocoa NSTableView architecture evolve. Where is the
history?
ja
mmalc crawford wrote:
On May 15, 2008, at 3:39 PM, Bruno Sanz Marino wrote:
The really first step with a language is allways to write code and
forget the "GUI" and the "buttons and windows" .....Then when you
know what are you doing and you can do what you want to do (like a
painter), you can think in the "GUIS" and all these stuff
I think this is a crucial point.
My guidance for Cocoa's alleged "steep learning curve" is, "Why are
you making it steep?"
It reminds me of the clichéd joke: "Doctor, it hurts when I do
this." "Well, don't do that."
There are plenty of ways to ease yourself it Cocoa development,
notably just as Bruno suggests here by ignoring the GUI and
learning about the Objective-C language an the basics of the
Foundation Frameworks.
Yet week in, week out, we see people who ignore the advice given in
the documentation and try to learn Objective-C, Foundation,
Interface Builder, *and* Cocoa bindings and Core Data all in one
go. It's no wonder it's daunting.
mmalc
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--
Joseph Ayers, Professor
Department of Biology and
Marine Science Center
Northeastern University
East Point, Nahant, MA 01908
Phone (781) 581-7370 x309(office), x335(lab)
Cellular (617) 755-7523, FAX: (781) 581-6076 Boston Office 444RI,
(617) 373-4044
eMail: email@hidden
http://www.neurotechnology.neu.edu/
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