Curiouser and Curiouser! on cocoa

A nice cup of cocoa maybe?

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 11:40:36 +0100

Can anyone recommend me some books for getting started with Objective-C and Cocoa programming?

Although my language of choice is Ruby these days and I'm not keen to start using a language without garbage collection I find myself thinking about writing some Mac software. I don't really have an app in mind yet, just a few vague thoughts, but the interface makes me want to do something with it ;-)

Recommendations?

Talk to me Cocoa

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 09:26:58 +0100

One of the things I'm trying to work out is the best way to approach writing GUI apps with Ruby. There are a number of options including wxRuby, fxRuby, QTRuby, Ruby/tk, RubyCocoa, and so on. Since I'm really interested in an Aqua interface (for my own benefit) I narrowed the field to wxRuby and RubyCocoa. The latter looks especially promising to me although I'm not making much progress on it.

Today I came across CocoaDialog which might act as a neat stop-gap for some of my needs. It's designed to be called from a script that needs to get user input or present information. So in the same way that you can use ruby-growl to display notifications from a script, you can use CocoaDialog to collect input.

Cocoa before bed doesn't always induce sleep

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 09:11:00 +0000

I'm not sure why but, last night before bed, I decided to go through the Cocoa application tutorial with Objective-C. The tutorial is necessarily a little verbose but after about 25 minutes I had a complete working currency converter application. The InterfaceBuilder/XCode combo feels a little bit retro compared to the Visual Studio behemoth but I was left with a feeling that this was no bad thing -- I never really took to Visual Studio.

At some point in the exercise I realised that much of what makes Cocoa code look so alien to me is Objective-C's [receiver aMessage:arg] message passing (method calling) convention and some compiler-neutral sugar for InterfaceBuilders benefit. I quickly got a feel for both and my discomfort began to subside. In the end I was left feeling that writing Cocoa applications might not be so bad and if I had a really good idea I could turn my hand to it.

I've had some initial thoughts about embedding the Ruby interpreter in a Cocoa application to implement an interface to the Ruby debugger. I have a feeling this is some considerable way beyond my current abilities with either Cocoa or Ruby. Andy has also been hassling me about the idea of embedding Squib in a WebKit based front-end. There are a couple of less well formed ideas sloshing around as well.

None of which did my chances of getting to sleep any good.

Mentor

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 01:29:54 +0100

Scott Stevenson is offering mentoring in Cocoa development at $85/hr (£46/hr man the dollar is tanking again).

I've learned a little Cocoa programming over the last few months but I still struggle with the subtleties of Objective-C, the Cocoa foundation and the toolset. However this may be a function of my starting with fairly unreasonable goals (like trying to write a plug-in to override some of Safari's native behaviour which means learning how to hook the input manager with SIMBL, categories, and method swizzling).

If I had the money and time I'd certainly consider this as a way of jump-starting my Cocoa development aspirations.