Kristof Dreier — where tech meets text

Willkommen im privaten Blog von Kristof Dreier, Webentwickler und Mac-Enthusiast aus Münster. Thematisch dreht es sich hier um Webdevelopment mit dem Zend Framework, kleinere Einschübe über Cocoa und vielleicht auch mal ein Blick in die Weiten von Ruby on Rails.

Objective-C and Cocoa

Sonntag, 18. März 2007 in

First of all I have to disappoint you: I will not explaine Objective-C1 or Cocoa2. If you are interested, I will provide some useful links at the end of the article.

Why did I choose Objective-C and Cocoa?
The first time I heard about Cocoa was two month after I bought my iMac. I never really wasted a thought about it, well, till yesterday.

I was kind of bored, surfing through the web and playing with the Address Book.
“Hm, if my father could easily pick clients from the address book and link them with the bills, that would be awesome!”

Booom! There it was again: Cocoa.
I fired up Safari and searched for anything that might help me solving this issue. I only knew PHP and never really tried to learn a real programming language, but no one would be able to stop me now!

I started off with a great book written by Bert Altenberg, Alex Clarke and Philippe Moughin: Become an Xcoder3
Well written and quite easy to understand. It covers the programming basics and lets you develop your first small Cocoa Application.
After reading the book, they got me. It seemed is as simple as, I do not know. It is goddamn simple to build up your own applications, although I am just scratching at the tip of an giant iceberg. I have hardly unterstood the whole concept of Objective-C, but Apple provides a book4 therefor, too.

All in all I am really satisfied with Cocoa and its programming structure, although there are many other APIs around in the programming world, that are also OS independent but I will stick with this for now. :)

References

1 Objective-C (Wikipedia)

2 Cocoa (Wikipedia)

3 Become an Xcoder Start Programming the Mac Using Objective-C

4 The Objective-C Programming Language

External links