...also late joing this thread
I have just spent the best part of five months learning enough
objective-c and cocoa to create useful apps.
I have been programming for 30 plus years and this has been the most
difficult learning experience of my life.
It is not just IB but also Project Builder and Xcode and now Xcode
under Leopard. And Objective-C also has its little ways.
I have no idea how the rest of you gained your expertise but working
on my own, even with the help of books and the internet it has been
an absolute nightmare. One problem intially was with IB itself which
wanted me to drag from controls to outlets etc. and which I found
very hard to learn and books like Cocoa Programming for Mac OSX and
Vermont recipes were very hard going. Perhaps it was their
verbosity, or the learning by rote. The examples on the internet are
not that plentiful and it takes a long time to find one's way around.
Now under Leopard people should find IB easier to learn because the
emphasis is on creating the header files first and this is easier to
understand. I could say masses more about this learning hell but
will desist except to say it is not over yet. When I moved over to
Leopard the compiler ceased to assign the proper type to the
variables passed in dynamically typed messages. And I still have
not solved this!!!
So I write merely to give heart to others. The learning nightmare
does ease over time but never forget the system's tendency every now
and then to send you right back to square one.
All this said, cocoa and Objective-C is beautiful. I just wish it
were easier to learn.
Big +1 to all you just said.
As soon as it gets a little more complicated or something is not
working as you would expect I get this "blackbox" feeling. Just today
IB3.1 failed on me miserably ...and I had no clue what to do. After
some fiddling "ibtool" saved the day. But hell - while it's slowly
getting better, really good examples and docs are still scarce.That
said the cocoacast screencast are priceless. And http://
www.cocoadev.com has some good information behind its ugly shell. The
Apple docs are extensive but it's hard to start from there. Sucks that
some of their videos are only available with (paid) ADC membership.
This mailing list is a great resource ...but maybe there is a reason
why even simple things get asked again and again.
I just can't believe how long it took me come up get shell script
executed without all pipe filling deadlock problems and so on. This is
so basic stuff and I wasted hours on that. Or take
NSMailDelivery ...it's deprecated - great. But do the docs state what
else to use? Just last week this came up a couple of times.
Well, lots of Cocoa tips and tricks to blog about I guess ;)
It surely is a steep learning curve - somehow I still like getting
into it. Scary! See you at WWDC :)
cheers
--
Torsten
http://vafer.org/blog
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