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. _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
