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At last! A great tutorial for developing OSX applications

December 6, 2006 on 12:42 pm | In Apple, Mac OS X, OS X Software | No Comments

Over at Wikibooks I found this gem, called Programming Mac OS X with Cocoa for beginners. So far, it is the best tutorial I’ve found on the web for developing Cocoa-based OSX applications. It takes you step-by-step on the process of writing a small sample app, illustrating the different concepts of both Objective-C and the Cocoa API.

So far, from what I’ve seen,. Objective-C is a nice language to work with. The syntax may throw you off a little bit at the beginning, but once you start playing with it, you’ll learn to appreciate features like having the parameter names as part of the method’s signatures. I also liked (for no particular reason, just personal preference) the syntax for message passing.

I think that more resources like this will increase the amount of applications available for OSX. One of the big advantages of developing for Microsoft or Java platforms is the vast amount of resources available in websites like MSDN or Sun’s and IBM’s websites. Apple’s Developer Connection, on the other hand, is not as neatly organized, and it is my opinion that it is missing more concrete examples and introductory material.

I also think that XCode could improve quite a bit. Now that I understand how Interface Builder integrates with XCode, one of my main isssues with it is gone (GUI-driven development a-la-Visual Studio). Still, it is missing features like a more robust Intellisense-like code completion, and a more intuitive interface. Maybe it is the fact that I am more familiar with tools like Eclipse or Visual Studio .NET – but still, maybe version 3.0 will bring it up to par with more mature development IDEs.

Check out the tutorial at this link: Programming Mac OS X with Cocoa for beginners