XCode and Objective-C from Visual Studio and C#

I’m a Windows developer in my spare time. I used to write MFC apps in C++ using Visual Studio 6. Then the world changed and now I write Winforms apps in C# using Visual Studio 2005. Windows has a certain way of doing things that I’ve become accustomed (brainwashed) into doing without thinking. Absorbing C# seemed to take about half an hour. I’m now attempting to learn how to write OSX applications.

This is my very first step at learning how to do all that Windows stuff on my Mac, but doing it the Mac way. Witness as I learn totally alien concepts and discover I’ve fatally broken my Mac’s devkit even before running it.

I’m getting a bit annoyed with the total lack of decent music playing software. There’s a choice between iTunes and … iTunes. Yeah I know there’s others like Cog and VLC but they don’t have the features I like. I come from Linux and am used to Amarok and its fantastic music organisation abilities. It really is nice being able to say “make a playlist of all my most played tracks” or “play everything that is classified as ‘rock’”.

iTunes is almost the right thing, but I keep all my music (as OGG files) on a server and really don’t want it attempting to drag it all into my Mac so it can index and catalogue it. I have told it not to copy the files, but then it has a small fit when told to update the iTunes library because it thinks I’m trying to add duplicates of all my music, except the new stuff.

All I want is a music manager that I can say “here is where the music is, just index the stuff and leave the files alone”. Come to think of it, I’d like a photo viewer that did the same thing. Maybe I need to make a combined media manager instead.

So that’s the objective (pun totally intended) that should keep me going. I have a purpose, rather than simply wanting to do this because it’s new and cool.

So far I have discovered XCode is strange and different, and ObjC is somewhat confusing. Fortunately I found a very handy document called Objective-C for C++ Programmers which shows what the ObjC equivalents of C++ constructs look like. This is really useful for making sense of the example code and tutorials from other sites; I know how to write software,  I just need to know how to do all the stuff I know how to do using ObjC, along with any exceptions and “we do it differently round here” conventions.

I’ve also been having a go with a simple XCode 3.0 Tutorial that I found while browsing the web. It helpfully showed me that stripping the PPC binaries from my entire system wasn’t such a wise move, since it broke XCode and I had to reinstall it. It was also good in showing me how to make a very simple GUI app using the tools.

In addition to those two useful links I have also found the following sites

• Theocacao - a blog about Cocoa development
• The strangely named Cocoa is my Girlfriend
• The Mac Developer Network
• And, of course, The Objective C Programming Language (pdf) by the Apple Developer Connection

I’ll be writing more as it happens. I’m thinking that by documenting how I got started I’ll have a reference for where to go and others might find it useful. Right now I’m a bit lost in a sea of tutorials, documents and reference guides. I’d quite like a helpful “Start Here if you’re new” button to press.

I’m off to read the “XCode Quick Tour Guide” I’ve just seen in the main XCode startup dialog. Right now I need a lot of step-by-step guide and a bit of background information. Attempting to bog me down in theory will cause a lot of confusion.

Tags: cocoa, objective-c, osx, xcode