The christmas decorations went up today and rather surprisingly edward has so far ignored the lot. We were expecting him to jump at the tree and maybe even start a fire (remember people, wire up your christmas lights safely.) To be honest I was disappointed. Whats the point in having a dog if it doesn’t bother to cause havoc? Lazy sod.
I’ve had a mad reading fit today, it’s all this cocoa stuff, its terribly addictive and i’m getting close to declaring that i do not wish to touch any other development architecture, regardless of OS other than cocoa from hence-forth.
I’ve also discovered O’Reilly’s Safari Bookshelf. It’s tricky to describe but really it’s an online library for tech-books. You read them on the website, html style. It’s like a library because you can only have so many books available to you at a time, rather like visiting a library and taking 4 or 5 books away with you. For about 10 USD/mo you have 5 slots, so you can choose 5 books to have access to, and to stop you from simply swapping the books that are in the slots to get around the limit, once a book is in a slot it is stuck there for a month before you can swap it for something else. There’s a 14 day free trial of the 10 slot tarrif. So I say sign up and try and cram 10 books of reading into 2 weeks, after all even if you don’t take up the subscription they can’t take the 10 books worth of knowledge away from you.
It’s not only O’Reilly books on there either, the catalogue is really huge with publishers such as sams, addisen wessley, prentice hall, heck even microsoft press is there.
Previously I would have been put off using such a service because it isn’t comfortable reading long books on a monitor. But now i’ve got a wee diddy ibook I can curl up on my bed and read at leisure, it’s no less cosy than having good old paperback.
Cocoa is tricky to grasp, it’s full of strange terminology that I haven’t come across before, mostly i guess because of objective-c. There’s lots of other strangeities too. I read the bulk of “Learning Cocoa with Objective-C
By Apple Computer, Inc. , James Duncan Davidson” but it left me with more questions than answers, and I have a feeling it may have been written by a schizophrenic as it didn’t seem capable of sticking to the same subject. BUT, there’s a saviour. I’ve started reading “COCOA PROGRAMMING FOR MAC OS X SECOND EDITION By Aaron Hillegass” and I think I’m in love with this guy. It’s one of those things that you cannot explain, why an author is more readable than another, you can’t explain what makes a novel a page-turner just as you can’t explain why it is one tech-book is so easy to follow and learn from whilst another goes in one ear and out the other. I think it might be my favourite tech-book ever, he explains so much detail but it never gets overwhelming, I feel like i’ve learnt more in 10 minutes than I have my whole life. Oh and you know an author is going to be likable when he says “Before going any further, assure yourself that you are not stupid and that some things are just hard. Armed with this silly affirmation and a well-rested mind, you are ready to conquer Cocoa.” He also told me that I need to get 10 hours sleep before starting the book, but I couldn’t wait.
I’m too pooped to bother adding any linkage to this entry lol.
Hows about reading about safari on safari whilst using safari?
I have this overwhelming urge to port one of my favourite OSS apps (not saying which, don’t want to get any-ones hopes up) to the mac, with a completely overhauled interface, in cocoa by my design. I attempted to start it today and surprise surprise, didn’t get very far before giving up. Well maybe not forever but for the moment. Trying to make your way around other peoples code, around a project you’ve never seen the source of before has to be one of the most stressful activities. You start off so optimistic but EVERYTIME that optimism is turned to desperation, trying to piece the puzzle together. Hate jigsaws. I got so stressed that I started to scratch and had to give up, it was doing my skin no good at all. haha. Ah well. I think it was exacerbated by trying to import the project into xcode, which I’m still not entirely buddy buddy with and I had a great deal of trouble getting it to adhere to the include paths. It kept telling me it couldn’t find some header files and I was pointing to the screen yelling “They’re there! I’ve showed you them already!” Ah well.
My first ever app for the mac. It’s pure cocoa! But what does it do? What is it for? Download it and see if you can work it out!