I took the plunge and spent my precious Sunday afternoon exploring the world of Apple software development. I hunkered down and completed the simple Currency Converter Guide from Apple’s Developer Connection website. I thought that the guide was well organized and covered most of the important topics and design decisions regarding object oriented programming and the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern. The information from the ADC website is not nearly sufficient to replace a good old written textbook but it is good enough to give an idea of what programming on the Mac OS X platform is like.
My prior experience with C/C++ was mostly in Microsoft Visual Studio so I’m a little spoiled when it comes to debugging and project management. Fortunately I didn’t run into any compilation errors and the program worked flawlessly on the first compile and run (first time that has ever happened to me!) so I can’t give any comparison to debugging in Xcode yet. This was also my first experience with GUI programming since all of my previous work was command line interface only. Interface Builder made linking into the controller a piece of cake and I was pretty impressed with how easy it was to design the interface. It was nowhere near as painful as my attempts with Python and wxWidgets and the buggy IDE.
I’m looking forward to playing around with some more complex applications, hopefully some of them will even be useful 🙂