A slight retraction...

shughes — Thu, 26 May 2005 08:24:18 -0700

I have to make a correction to my previous post. I said that application developers get “easy” access to basically add Spotlight search capabilities “for free”.

“Easy” and “for free” did not take into account the energy said developer would have to expend to learn Cocoa (Apple’s version of Microsoft MFC). As odd as MFC was in terms of some of the design choices, at least it’s back-end was in the very popular C++. Apple’s code-behind is Objective-C.

My GUI development (which, btw, has always been terrible as I really have only an Engineer’s eye) has moved beyond the Cocoa/MFC style, where I actually prefer to create my UI at runtime (changing it up as appropriate). I’m referring to Java Swing style or the newer Microsoft .NET visual designers. I use a visual designer to get a grasp of the initial layout, and then use code to manipulate the layout based on runtime properties. This could explain why my GUI’s always look like crap. :)

If anyone knows of any good references on Cocoa (from a .NET/Java user’s perspective), I’d appreciate it. Although there are wrapper interfaces available from .NET and Java, you still have to understand Cocoa before you can use these and you still have to use XCode/InterfaceBuilder to layout your GUI (and all of it’s events/actions) ahead of time.

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Global Reset: A slight retraction...

A slight retraction...