Meeting my new Objective 2.0
28 February 2008

"You'll just have to nag me to write Windows versions of the software. But to be brutally honest, that's not something I'm in any particular hurry to do this lifetime."

I've been hacking away at computer programming now for more years than I care to mention. From the early days of messing about with Sinclair and Commodore BASIC through DOS programming in Turbo Pascal and latterly various forms of web based scripting: PHP, Javascript and XHTML to name a few.

Although my primary coding activities over the past decade have been web based, it may come as surprise to people who know me (geeky people, but people nonetheless) that I get the biggest programming kick out of writing stand alone applications. The opportunities to do this, however, have been limited.

At work I've written many processing tasks (mostly server based) in C# under Microsoft's .NET framework. For Windows Services, this is actually a very good language and Visual Studio is a great coding tool. However, for Windows Forms (ie application) coding it's not so good IMHO.

Not long after I switched to the Mac platform in eary 2005 I bought a Mac programming book and began to investigate the new XCode IDE and the Objective-C language. I'd get "so far" with the book, put it on one side to get on with other things and then have to start again the next time I got round to picking it up. This was about the time I started my web design business so what with this start up and continuing to hold down a full time job there wasn't much time left for learning a whole new programming language.

Recently, however, I've made the time to delve into Objective-C again, probably my fifth attempt since the PC switch but the most successful so far. Typically, with the launch of Leopard in October 2007, Apple made some significant changes to the underlying Mac frameworks, radically altered their GUI design software Interface Builder and brought out Objective-C 2.0. I'm not knocking it (far from it) but it does make learning from the book I bought more of challenge. I've found the way to deal with this is to code in Objective-C 1 on a Mac running Tiger and then try to work out how to achieve the same thing in the new environment. This has worked out pretty well.

I finally made enough progress to begin work on my first full blown Mac application. After all, I've got over 20 years programming experience; the challange has just been how to bring that experience to the Apple Mac platform. This first app will be ready for beta testing in about a month. For friends who have Macs I'll be looking for friendly, unpaid, beta testing so expect a grovelling e-mail from me to this end when the first beta comes out. For my Windows friends, you'll just have to nag me to write Windows versions of the software. But to be brutally honest, that's not something I'm in any particular hurry to do this lifetime.

More news on all this on my software page when I've got more to report.