Objective-C 2.0 has completely changed the game (and rendered most of the earlier gdb tricks mentioned to no longer work as well). That said, it has also added some pretty slick new features that I hope I'll be able to give justice to once I get some more free time and some more coherent thoughts.
Just thought I'd let y'all know where things were.
I've been writing Cocoa plugins for Quartz Composer (see kineme.net for more details) pretty consistently for the past month or so.
Such continual writing, especially in an already-existing application, has taught me many things, very quickly. It's quite fun; I now wish that I had had the opportunity (or probably just the motivation) to work in such an environment when I was learning C or C++ or even Basic. Immersion is such a powerful learning tool. Not to downplay the importance of theory though; without the theory I've learned from my first languages I would probably be dead in the water in Cocoa.
I'm no expert yet, nor will I be for quite a while (especially with Leopard coming so soon, with its new Xcode and tools), but I am way more comfortable with development, and, perhaps more importantly, with debugging.
So, what direction is there now for this blog? Anyone with determination can push themselves through the differences in Objective-C. I can't offer much more than anecdotal evidence for that.
Perhaps I should just make lots of demos to show how to do various things? Since I have zero readers, I guess this decision is ultimately up to me...
Normally I work in command-line land because it's far more familiar to me, and easier to control. There's also naturally less code overhead, so you can focus on what's actually going on without all the extra fluff. That said, any useful application will need a useful user-interface to actually help someone accomplish work.
Xcode is Apple's IDE of choice for developing Cocoa applications. To compliment the 7 trillion screen-shot-laden Xcode blogs out there, I'll shortly be adding my own contribution to the mix.
That said, I intend to focus more on documenting how various GUI-related problems are solved using existing tools. It takes a considerable amount of work to make a well-polished user interface (probably another reason why I avoid GUI-land :), so I'll try to reveal as much polish as I can uncover.
Tomorrow, we'll begin our GUI adventures. Don't worry though, we'll still fall back to command-line for a while at least, to illustrate basic concepts and methods.
