Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem
Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem
- Subject: Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem
- From: Graham Cox <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 21 May 2008 09:52:57 +1000
On 21 May 2008, at 2:41 am, Mark Roseman wrote:
4. Doesn't support everything. I'm being slightly facetious here,
but what I really mean is that there are some things you might think
are (should be) easy, that you have to create for yourself. If
anyone has used Tk, you know about its canvas widget, which provides
a very rich structured graphics framework which takes care of
redraws, most event handling, and does it in a very concise and self-
contained way. Programmers can use that facility for a surprisingly
wide range of common tasks. In Cocoa you need to handle that
yourself. With tools like the canvas, I've taught experienced
programmers enough Tcl/Tk to put together some useful tools in a
matter of a couple of hours, and non-programmers in a couple of
days. Couldn't do that with ObjC and Cocoa. It doesn't take long
in Cocoa before you're at the "custom view" level.
At the risk of fighting hype with hype, you might be interested in my
DrawKit project, which *may* be somewhat similar (I'm not familiar
with Tk, so I can't claim it's exactly the same, but it sounds like it
might be similar). http://apptree.net/drawkitmain.htm
My own personal experience with Cocoa has been very positive, I have
not found myself hung up on too many conceptual or functional issues
for very long. I come from a C++ background, having been steeped in
that for over a decade before starting with Cocoa. I had to "unlearn"
a lot. But it wasn't hard - I found Obj-C a liberating language
compared to C++ and I do feel that in many ways much of the
programming I used to do was keeping the language happy, not being
productive in itself (I don't want to rehash the C++ vs. Obj-C
arguments here, I'm just saying that's how I felt).
Possibly one of my advantages was taking up Cocoa before Core Data and
Bindings and Obj-C 2.0 and Garbage Collection were added - that meant
they were a delta on top of what I already knew (and in fact I still
haven't bothered exploring some of them to any great extent). Maybe
the learning curve has got steeper because of these extra things - you
certainly see a lot of newbies asking about them. I think you can get
a long, long way in Cocoa without any of these so perhaps my advice to
a beginner would be: walk before you try to run. Forget about all
these "advanced" features and work on something by doing it the old
way at first. That shouldn't be quite so large a mountain to climb and
you will pick up enough to move to the higher levels much more easily.
Establish a base camp before you embark on the final push to the
summit. I learned a lot of Cocoa's basics from Hillegass's book, and I
recommend it. But just *maybe* the second edition will prove to be a
better bet for a beginner than the third?
hth,
G.
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