Ron Okamoto says:

Quote

Linux "gives people another motivation to examine their platform choice".

No no, Ron. Microsoft gives people motivation to examine their platform choice. Linux and OS X are both alternatives to Windows, but it's Windows itself that provides the motivation for looking elsewhere!

Good news.

Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers.
[GASP}
Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers.

-Steve Ballmer

+

Hearing this on the heels of all the great news coming from Wall Street makes it hard to believe the company almost went under back in the 1990s. I doubt anyone could have imagined back then that, with the return of Steve Jobs, the company would make such a turnaround, let alone become a market leader in digital music (with no signs of slowing down). Here's hoping the iPod halo effect comes through, too.

That sound baaaaaaaaad.

I intalled Xcode when I got Panther as I used to programme in the old 8-bit days of Apple ][s and Commodore PETs and I would now like to do some programming on my mac - and add to that 250% even if only by a tiny bit.

I worked through the Xcode example and although I could get it to work, it was such a step change I had no idea what I was doing.

What does someone like me do who understands memory maps, bytes, bits, simple mahine code etc*. but gets completely lost when people talk of frameworks, classes, object orientated programming etc?
Can anyone suggest a good book or guide - there is too much on the internet to know where to start...

*(Edit - I think I was an OK BASIC, Fortran and Pascal programmer)

TIA

The latter terms sound like they are from Java which is an object oriented language. I took a Java course at a local community college.

If you are after instant gratification, have a play with AppleScript:

Theres a good tutorial at:
http://www.applescriptsourcebook.com

and a good reference at:
http://www.macscripter.net

It's fairly powerful and you can do pretty impressive things within a couple of afternoons of playing.

Apple's developer marketing people have been smoking serious crack the last couple years. The way they are all over the open source community reminds me of a South Orange County teenager trying to get street cred by showing 4 inches of his boxers.

I develop products for the Mac and make good money in this market. I use REALbasic and CodeWarrior and get the added benefit of being able to support Mac OS 9 and Windows. Why? Because the people who pay money for software generally have to work in 2 or 3 worlds and they appreciate software that straddles with them. Do you guys wonder why Apple marketshare continues to decline (despite growing unit sales)? They still think it's them or Microsoft -- XCode or Visual Studio. There is no vision in Apple's developer channel about how to make the Mac complement pervasive Windows boxes. None.

Anyway, reading the ADC newsletter every week is, to me, like hearing Radio Pyongyang on shortwave ("the yankee imperialist blah blah blah"). It is almost funny to hear them do their rally cry because they are so irrelevant it's comical. Don't get me wrong... I love my Mac and I like Apple the company. But they ought to be pushing dev products like REALbasic rather than their own proprietary (and yes, XCode is very proprietary in that it just makes Mac stuff) offerings.

Oh yeah, you can make serious, industrial strength Mac software with REALbasic, despite the "basic" in the name. And there is a great community of successful developers who use the product. If you hear someone dismiss it out of hand, it's a good sign they'd rather keep their nerd cred than get anything done. If you hear it ommited by the Apple dev guy, same deal. He can't be that clueless, can he?

-Brad Hutchings
Hutchings Software
brad@componentx.com

Thanks - having a look at both of those links

Will,

A good place for general information on Mac Development is the O'reilly website at:
http://www.macdevcenter.com/mac/

They have a section of articles about development at:
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/ct/59

It seems to me your basic stumbling block is object oriented programming(OOP), much different from assembler. I can't think of a good book off the top of my head but any good OOP book would likely be related to a specific language. You might start by choosing the language and then a book from there.