Mac Development
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It all started when my wife gifted me a new iMac on my birthday. At that time Mac was something new to me and for about a month I used it for VS development, launching VS on virtual machines. Then one day I became curious how I can develop a simple application for Mac. Then the iPhone SDK was released and I got deeper into iPhone and mac development. Initially, I resisted Objective-C, which is the primary development language for Mac. The syntax looked ugly to me. I am not sure how many people will get impressed by the following syntax:
[rect setWidth:100 height:200];But gradually as I understand more and more. I love Objective-C which is a combination of C and Small-talk. So it has the goodies of C and also that of dynamically typed languages such as Ruby and JavaScript. One thing though, I once considered that VS is the best IDE available. Now after being exposed to IDE's such as XCode, Eclipse and NetBeans, I don't think it is true anymore. It is amazing how different IDEs have come close to VS and some are even better than VS.You have, what I would term, a very formal turn of phrase not seen in these isles since the old King passed from this world to the next. martin_hughes on VDK
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
I am not sure how many people will get impressed by the following syntax:
Named parameters. I love 'em. Started writing a simple CAD program on OS/2 using Objective C (GCC) long before i ever took C++ seriously (never finished it though; the environment was sadly lacking when it came to OS/2 GUI dev). :sigh:
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
One thing though, I once considered that VS is the best IDE available. Now after being exposed to IDE's such as XCode, Eclipse and NetBeans, I don't think it is true anymore. It is amazing how different IDEs have come close to VS and some are even better than VS.
You know, i'm not entirely convinced that IDEs in general are a good end when it comes to working with non-trivial projects. In some ways, i guess i'm realizing how much i've lost by allowing myself to become accustom to using VS for everything. There was a time when the first thing i'd do on a new project was write a set of scripts and MAKEFILEs to automate building, testing, and putting together an installation. Now i set up a VS project and do the rest manually... The former is a good deal quicker than dealing with
make, but with the rest it just might be a net loss. :~Citizen 20.1.01
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'
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It all started when my wife gifted me a new iMac on my birthday. At that time Mac was something new to me and for about a month I used it for VS development, launching VS on virtual machines. Then one day I became curious how I can develop a simple application for Mac. Then the iPhone SDK was released and I got deeper into iPhone and mac development. Initially, I resisted Objective-C, which is the primary development language for Mac. The syntax looked ugly to me. I am not sure how many people will get impressed by the following syntax:
[rect setWidth:100 height:200];But gradually as I understand more and more. I love Objective-C which is a combination of C and Small-talk. So it has the goodies of C and also that of dynamically typed languages such as Ruby and JavaScript. One thing though, I once considered that VS is the best IDE available. Now after being exposed to IDE's such as XCode, Eclipse and NetBeans, I don't think it is true anymore. It is amazing how different IDEs have come close to VS and some are even better than VS.You have, what I would term, a very formal turn of phrase not seen in these isles since the old King passed from this world to the next. martin_hughes on VDK
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
The syntax looked ugly to me. I am not sure how many people will get impressed by the following syntax:
I had the same initial reaction. But now I find objective c to be very expressive and clean. It's too bad it's designers chose not to open it up in the same way C++ was. It's quite possible we'd have an entirely different development landscape.
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
It is amazing how different IDEs have come close to VS and some are even better than VS.
I haven't thought about the best or worst argument but I do really like XCode.
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Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
The syntax looked ugly to me. I am not sure how many people will get impressed by the following syntax:
I had the same initial reaction. But now I find objective c to be very expressive and clean. It's too bad it's designers chose not to open it up in the same way C++ was. It's quite possible we'd have an entirely different development landscape.
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
It is amazing how different IDEs have come close to VS and some are even better than VS.
I haven't thought about the best or worst argument but I do really like XCode.
Chris Austin wrote:
I do really like XCode
Me too. The best feature is that of snapshots. I wish VS had that too.
You have, what I would term, a very formal turn of phrase not seen in these isles since the old King passed from this world to the next. martin_hughes on VDK
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It all started when my wife gifted me a new iMac on my birthday. At that time Mac was something new to me and for about a month I used it for VS development, launching VS on virtual machines. Then one day I became curious how I can develop a simple application for Mac. Then the iPhone SDK was released and I got deeper into iPhone and mac development. Initially, I resisted Objective-C, which is the primary development language for Mac. The syntax looked ugly to me. I am not sure how many people will get impressed by the following syntax:
[rect setWidth:100 height:200];But gradually as I understand more and more. I love Objective-C which is a combination of C and Small-talk. So it has the goodies of C and also that of dynamically typed languages such as Ruby and JavaScript. One thing though, I once considered that VS is the best IDE available. Now after being exposed to IDE's such as XCode, Eclipse and NetBeans, I don't think it is true anymore. It is amazing how different IDEs have come close to VS and some are even better than VS.You have, what I would term, a very formal turn of phrase not seen in these isles since the old King passed from this world to the next. martin_hughes on VDK
I am learning Objective C when my Mac finally arrives. I am looking forward to it.
Christian Graus Please read this if you don't understand the answer I've given you "also I don't think "TranslateOneToTwoBillion OneHundredAndFortySevenMillion FourHundredAndEightyThreeThousand SixHundredAndFortySeven()" is a very good choice for a function name" - SpacixOne ( offering help to someone who really needed it ) ( spaces added for the benefit of people running at < 1280x1024 )
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It all started when my wife gifted me a new iMac on my birthday. At that time Mac was something new to me and for about a month I used it for VS development, launching VS on virtual machines. Then one day I became curious how I can develop a simple application for Mac. Then the iPhone SDK was released and I got deeper into iPhone and mac development. Initially, I resisted Objective-C, which is the primary development language for Mac. The syntax looked ugly to me. I am not sure how many people will get impressed by the following syntax:
[rect setWidth:100 height:200];But gradually as I understand more and more. I love Objective-C which is a combination of C and Small-talk. So it has the goodies of C and also that of dynamically typed languages such as Ruby and JavaScript. One thing though, I once considered that VS is the best IDE available. Now after being exposed to IDE's such as XCode, Eclipse and NetBeans, I don't think it is true anymore. It is amazing how different IDEs have come close to VS and some are even better than VS.You have, what I would term, a very formal turn of phrase not seen in these isles since the old King passed from this world to the next. martin_hughes on VDK
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
NetBeans
I gave it a shot on Windows a month ago or so. While it indeed looked nice and seemed to have some features out of the box that VS only offers with addons, it was completely unusable with a "solution" comprised of many, many projects, which VS with addons handles with a breeze.
-- Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time - Bertrand Russel
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It all started when my wife gifted me a new iMac on my birthday. At that time Mac was something new to me and for about a month I used it for VS development, launching VS on virtual machines. Then one day I became curious how I can develop a simple application for Mac. Then the iPhone SDK was released and I got deeper into iPhone and mac development. Initially, I resisted Objective-C, which is the primary development language for Mac. The syntax looked ugly to me. I am not sure how many people will get impressed by the following syntax:
[rect setWidth:100 height:200];But gradually as I understand more and more. I love Objective-C which is a combination of C and Small-talk. So it has the goodies of C and also that of dynamically typed languages such as Ruby and JavaScript. One thing though, I once considered that VS is the best IDE available. Now after being exposed to IDE's such as XCode, Eclipse and NetBeans, I don't think it is true anymore. It is amazing how different IDEs have come close to VS and some are even better than VS.You have, what I would term, a very formal turn of phrase not seen in these isles since the old King passed from this world to the next. martin_hughes on VDK
I can't share your enthusiasm. I'm working full-time on a Mac and I do most of my development stuff under Windows in a VM. However, I currently work on a large code base which won't compile under Windows so I'm forced to use Linux/Mac. And I have found XCode to be severely restricted in its capabilities so I've wholly adapted the GVIm/makefile approach. Actually, this works surprisingly well and I believe that with the right skill (which I don't yet possess) this may make fully-fledged IDEs redundant. At the moment, I still struggle to quickly switch between many files … but well.
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It all started when my wife gifted me a new iMac on my birthday. At that time Mac was something new to me and for about a month I used it for VS development, launching VS on virtual machines. Then one day I became curious how I can develop a simple application for Mac. Then the iPhone SDK was released and I got deeper into iPhone and mac development. Initially, I resisted Objective-C, which is the primary development language for Mac. The syntax looked ugly to me. I am not sure how many people will get impressed by the following syntax:
[rect setWidth:100 height:200];But gradually as I understand more and more. I love Objective-C which is a combination of C and Small-talk. So it has the goodies of C and also that of dynamically typed languages such as Ruby and JavaScript. One thing though, I once considered that VS is the best IDE available. Now after being exposed to IDE's such as XCode, Eclipse and NetBeans, I don't think it is true anymore. It is amazing how different IDEs have come close to VS and some are even better than VS.You have, what I would term, a very formal turn of phrase not seen in these isles since the old King passed from this world to the next. martin_hughes on VDK
I remember 4 years ago when I worked with XCode for once in a while it just crashed without any warning. It was pretty frustrating ;)The GUI Builder was the first time when I was exposed to the MVC, that's pretty cool. If you'll become accustomed to Objective-C you'll like it.
Work @ Network integrated solutions | Flickr | A practical use of the MVC pattern
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I can't share your enthusiasm. I'm working full-time on a Mac and I do most of my development stuff under Windows in a VM. However, I currently work on a large code base which won't compile under Windows so I'm forced to use Linux/Mac. And I have found XCode to be severely restricted in its capabilities so I've wholly adapted the GVIm/makefile approach. Actually, this works surprisingly well and I believe that with the right skill (which I don't yet possess) this may make fully-fledged IDEs redundant. At the moment, I still struggle to quickly switch between many files … but well.
If you are a professional working on Mac and other platforms then I cannot reccomend the Qt library highly enough. I develop on windows using MSDEV but then the same code just works on mac and linux as well. The number of platform specific tweaks I need to make for the mac are so small that any unix text editor will do. It also writes your makefiles for each platform. Personally I use nedit, but that is just because I can't be bothered to spend the time learning vi, emacs or anything else.
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It all started when my wife gifted me a new iMac on my birthday. At that time Mac was something new to me and for about a month I used it for VS development, launching VS on virtual machines. Then one day I became curious how I can develop a simple application for Mac. Then the iPhone SDK was released and I got deeper into iPhone and mac development. Initially, I resisted Objective-C, which is the primary development language for Mac. The syntax looked ugly to me. I am not sure how many people will get impressed by the following syntax:
[rect setWidth:100 height:200];But gradually as I understand more and more. I love Objective-C which is a combination of C and Small-talk. So it has the goodies of C and also that of dynamically typed languages such as Ruby and JavaScript. One thing though, I once considered that VS is the best IDE available. Now after being exposed to IDE's such as XCode, Eclipse and NetBeans, I don't think it is true anymore. It is amazing how different IDEs have come close to VS and some are even better than VS.You have, what I would term, a very formal turn of phrase not seen in these isles since the old King passed from this world to the next. martin_hughes on VDK
I definately share your enthusiasm for the whole Mac development scenario. I also shied away from Objective C at first but when taken in bite sized chunks and with perhaps a good book it's easy enough to get to grips with. And I love the look and feel of XCode. It's come a long way in just the 3 years that I've owned Mac's. I agree with others though that if you load up a project with thousands of source files it gets a lot less usefull. I'm really struggling though. There are a couple of main problems that I see. Documentation is one. There is masses of it. Ordinarily that wouldn't be an issue but as a complete new user you tend to suffer a bit from information overload and not really knowing which bit you need to be looking at because you don't know how to do what it is you want to acheive. I guess the same would be said if I was just starting out in the Windows world without assistance. The other problem I find is that it's not easy to just pick it up and put it down in small chunks. I don't get a lot of time to do Mac development as my day job is entirely Windows / C# based so the only time I do get is maybe a couple of hours once a month in the precious little free time I get. I feel if I could immerse myself, perhaps by getting a job in the Mac world then it would all come very quickly but there's another catch 22 coming along there! Ironically, last week I found myself really struggling to acheive something in VS/C# that I really knew I could do very easily with interface builder and the MVC paradigm.
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If you are a professional working on Mac and other platforms then I cannot reccomend the Qt library highly enough. I develop on windows using MSDEV but then the same code just works on mac and linux as well. The number of platform specific tweaks I need to make for the mac are so small that any unix text editor will do. It also writes your makefiles for each platform. Personally I use nedit, but that is just because I can't be bothered to spend the time learning vi, emacs or anything else.
Thanks for the advice. Luckily, however, I'm working on a library and don't need to bother with user interfaces. The reason my code only works on Unix is that I rely on some third party libraries that are poorly written and (for no good reason) are completely platform-specific. However, I am hopeful that this will change in the foreseeable future.
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Thanks for the advice. Luckily, however, I'm working on a library and don't need to bother with user interfaces. The reason my code only works on Unix is that I rely on some third party libraries that are poorly written and (for no good reason) are completely platform-specific. However, I am hopeful that this will change in the foreseeable future.
It is also worth bearing Qt in mind for non-gui code. It does also work rather nicely as a general OS abstraction layer (files, processes, worker threads, sockets etc.) in a very similar way to those in other languages, for example Python os and sys packages or the Java SE libraries. You could always have a windows version that accessed the unix utilities via web services ;)
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It is also worth bearing Qt in mind for non-gui code. It does also work rather nicely as a general OS abstraction layer (files, processes, worker threads, sockets etc.) in a very similar way to those in other languages, for example Python os and sys packages or the Java SE libraries. You could always have a windows version that accessed the unix utilities via web services ;)
As an alternative, remember that Objective-C integrates with C++ quite well. That opens up the possibility of using STL, BOOST, and other proven, cross-platform libraries.
Paul
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It all started when my wife gifted me a new iMac on my birthday. At that time Mac was something new to me and for about a month I used it for VS development, launching VS on virtual machines. Then one day I became curious how I can develop a simple application for Mac. Then the iPhone SDK was released and I got deeper into iPhone and mac development. Initially, I resisted Objective-C, which is the primary development language for Mac. The syntax looked ugly to me. I am not sure how many people will get impressed by the following syntax:
[rect setWidth:100 height:200];But gradually as I understand more and more. I love Objective-C which is a combination of C and Small-talk. So it has the goodies of C and also that of dynamically typed languages such as Ruby and JavaScript. One thing though, I once considered that VS is the best IDE available. Now after being exposed to IDE's such as XCode, Eclipse and NetBeans, I don't think it is true anymore. It is amazing how different IDEs have come close to VS and some are even better than VS.You have, what I would term, a very formal turn of phrase not seen in these isles since the old King passed from this world to the next. martin_hughes on VDK
So after reading this thread this morning, I have decided that I am going to "commit" and try to learn Objective-C. I once a long long time ago took some C++ classes, so that should help me right? What is the best source for learning to develop on the mac? What do you think? Any suggestions? Please let me know. I develop in VS2008 right now, and sometimes learning the IDE is half the battle. So any ideas of where to get started would be awesome! Happy Friday
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It all started when my wife gifted me a new iMac on my birthday. At that time Mac was something new to me and for about a month I used it for VS development, launching VS on virtual machines. Then one day I became curious how I can develop a simple application for Mac. Then the iPhone SDK was released and I got deeper into iPhone and mac development. Initially, I resisted Objective-C, which is the primary development language for Mac. The syntax looked ugly to me. I am not sure how many people will get impressed by the following syntax:
[rect setWidth:100 height:200];But gradually as I understand more and more. I love Objective-C which is a combination of C and Small-talk. So it has the goodies of C and also that of dynamically typed languages such as Ruby and JavaScript. One thing though, I once considered that VS is the best IDE available. Now after being exposed to IDE's such as XCode, Eclipse and NetBeans, I don't think it is true anymore. It is amazing how different IDEs have come close to VS and some are even better than VS.You have, what I would term, a very formal turn of phrase not seen in these isles since the old King passed from this world to the next. martin_hughes on VDK
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
One thing though, I once considered that VS is the best IDE available. Now after being exposed to IDE's such as XCode, Eclipse and NetBeans, I don't think it is true anymore. It is amazing how different IDEs have come close to VS and some are even better than VS.
I don't think there is a single "good" IDE out there. All that I know of are bloated, slow and inflexible. I just use vim nowdays.
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So after reading this thread this morning, I have decided that I am going to "commit" and try to learn Objective-C. I once a long long time ago took some C++ classes, so that should help me right? What is the best source for learning to develop on the mac? What do you think? Any suggestions? Please let me know. I develop in VS2008 right now, and sometimes learning the IDE is half the battle. So any ideas of where to get started would be awesome! Happy Friday
I tried variety of things. I quickly skimmed through some documents on Apple's web site: Cocoa Development Guide, Objective-C guide and iPhone development guide. Then, I started with Cocoa tutorial on Apple's web site it gave me a good overview on how to use the IDE, basic concepts of windowing and event handling and Objective-C. The thing which I benefited the most form was to read Andrew Hillegrass's book on Cocoa Development for Mac. Unfortunately, this book is outdated (wrt to IDE) but I did not have any problem figuring out the things in new IDE. Also if you can wait a month the new edition of the book is due to arrive. This is one of the best technical books I have read. The book is suited for both beginners and advanced users.
You have, what I would term, a very formal turn of phrase not seen in these isles since the old King passed from this world to the next. martin_hughes on VDK
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I tried variety of things. I quickly skimmed through some documents on Apple's web site: Cocoa Development Guide, Objective-C guide and iPhone development guide. Then, I started with Cocoa tutorial on Apple's web site it gave me a good overview on how to use the IDE, basic concepts of windowing and event handling and Objective-C. The thing which I benefited the most form was to read Andrew Hillegrass's book on Cocoa Development for Mac. Unfortunately, this book is outdated (wrt to IDE) but I did not have any problem figuring out the things in new IDE. Also if you can wait a month the new edition of the book is due to arrive. This is one of the best technical books I have read. The book is suited for both beginners and advanced users.
You have, what I would term, a very formal turn of phrase not seen in these isles since the old King passed from this world to the next. martin_hughes on VDK
Thanks for the tips. I did the tutorial of the Currency Converter on Apple's site a little while ago, I'll keep my eye out for the book. Thanks again.
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Thanks for the tips. I did the tutorial of the Currency Converter on Apple's site a little while ago, I'll keep my eye out for the book. Thanks again.
Check out http://cocoadevcentral.com/. Tons of good examples. I really try to use a plug-in architecture when writing projects in C# using Visual Studio 2005 and CocoaDev has a great article about that kind of stuff. There's also http://osx.hyperjeff.net/reference/CocoaArticles.php - it looks like it has some good articles there. And you can also google any cocoa question, there's usually a blog with the answer out there somewhere. :)
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Thanks for the tips. I did the tutorial of the Currency Converter on Apple's site a little while ago, I'll keep my eye out for the book. Thanks again.
I am a C# developer in my professional life, but I have been a Mac enthusiast for years. I just never built up the steam to learn Cocoa until quite recently. I have the 2nd edition of the Hillegass book, and it is great. I have it in my backpack right now! If you go to amazon you will find that the new 3rd edition will be released in less than a month. You can pre-order it now and save some money too. (I already have mine ordered.) The best thing I can suggest to you is to find someone who also wants to learn Cocoa and pair up. I am a big proponent of Agile techniques and I find that pair programming really helps me to learn new tech. The process of bouncing ideas off one another is truly constructive.
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I am a C# developer in my professional life, but I have been a Mac enthusiast for years. I just never built up the steam to learn Cocoa until quite recently. I have the 2nd edition of the Hillegass book, and it is great. I have it in my backpack right now! If you go to amazon you will find that the new 3rd edition will be released in less than a month. You can pre-order it now and save some money too. (I already have mine ordered.) The best thing I can suggest to you is to find someone who also wants to learn Cocoa and pair up. I am a big proponent of Agile techniques and I find that pair programming really helps me to learn new tech. The process of bouncing ideas off one another is truly constructive.
Thanks so much for all the responses. I am going to see if I can find a copy of the Hillegass book to get started with. I also found a pretty nice podcast (so far) called CocoaCast. I like the videos and he follows that book you've all mentioned.
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Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
I am not sure how many people will get impressed by the following syntax:
Named parameters. I love 'em. Started writing a simple CAD program on OS/2 using Objective C (GCC) long before i ever took C++ seriously (never finished it though; the environment was sadly lacking when it came to OS/2 GUI dev). :sigh:
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
One thing though, I once considered that VS is the best IDE available. Now after being exposed to IDE's such as XCode, Eclipse and NetBeans, I don't think it is true anymore. It is amazing how different IDEs have come close to VS and some are even better than VS.
You know, i'm not entirely convinced that IDEs in general are a good end when it comes to working with non-trivial projects. In some ways, i guess i'm realizing how much i've lost by allowing myself to become accustom to using VS for everything. There was a time when the first thing i'd do on a new project was write a set of scripts and MAKEFILEs to automate building, testing, and putting together an installation. Now i set up a VS project and do the rest manually... The former is a good deal quicker than dealing with
make, but with the rest it just might be a net loss. :~Citizen 20.1.01
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'
I too used to be a VS addicted individual. When I bought my MacBook Pro I found I could still use VS (through Virtual Machine) running it better on the Mac than it ran on the PC based solution. I had experience with Eclipse though and one of the things that I liked with it was the ability to use the scripts of past. In fact that is one of the many real strengths in my opinion. So much so that I have made a concerted effort that future development will not happen in VS when and where ever possible.