New Year’s Resolution: 1680×1050

I finally made the switch and got myself a mac. It’s more along the lines of I had to, in order to do some iPhone development, and probably will not be my main machine. Touching a mac for development purposes for the first time was a big shift. Stepping outside the Visual Studio and .NET was not quite comfortable. I say it wasn’t because I have to admit as much as I didn’t want to go closer to C from C#, objective-C is a whole different world, and at the end of the day it ain’t that bad.

Having worked with .NET for a long time, I am very accustomed to how things are grouped in .NET. All in all I think it’s still the best framework out there. However, the more I read about Mac development, more I liked certain things about how the framework is layred.

At the same time the OOP interperation of Apple — or NeXT in this case, since can clearly see the NeXT residue in objective-C by looking at the NS prefixes– is quite differen than of Microsoft’s.  Some of the things I quite like are:

• Message dispatch
• All-heap allocation
• Dynamic runtime
• Anonymous objects

I’ve always been a proponent of statically typed languages, especially C#, and I still am. Even VB has always felt weird to me despite the fact that it runs on the same framework. In the 36 hours that I spent with objective-C however, things felt pretty intuitive and didn’t bother me much. I have to admit that I have not even compiled a relatively large code-base yet, so my opinion might change in the near future.

One thing that greatly annoys me however is the IDE. I am convinced that Microsoft wrote the best IDE on the planet so far. Having used emacs, vi, eclipse, xcode, notepad++ and VS, I have to admit that VS wins hands down. I think that’s one of the reasons why developers will hesitate switching to another environment including myself. I am constantly trying to see how I can use Visual studio to write Objective-C.
All in all the architecture surprised me greatly. After all the next couple of months might be enjoyable writing some iPhone apps.

For anyone interested in finding resources on iPhone development. In the absence of a good eBook, I turned to online resources. During my hunt for resources I came across a couple of links that I found quite interesting. Here’s a list of sites that I personally used to get a feel of Objective-C and Cocoa.

• http://www.otierney.net/objective-c.html
• http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php
• http://icodeblog.com