Learning Cocoa Progress

I made it about a third of the way through the Cocoa book yesterday. Good progress.

I still get sturvish when I think about outlets and actions too much. Actually, the concept is easy, the problem is knowing what to drag to what. My hurdle in learning Cocoa is understanding the relationship between what I see in Interface Builder and what I see in my code.

The joke I’ve heard about Cocoa is that a tutorial will advertise something like, “You can write a full-featured text editor with just three lines of code!” And then the tutorial takes 25 pages showing all the non-coding steps you have to do. For a certain type of programmer it’s pretty alien. Me, I’ve even always preferred .r files (text files) to working with ResEdit. And I never dug PowerPlant or MFC much. I like text.

That’s not to judge Cocoa but to say it’s different from what I’m used to. I’m enjoying learning it, and I already expect to use it in the future.

In fact, it’s about all I can do to stick with the book—I want to leap off and start working on some of the ideas I have for new apps. Patience!