Digging into Objective-C (again)

While the concept of writing native Mac apps in Ruby definitely appeals to me, I must say the experience isn’t quite as easy as I was looking for.

After writing my last post I realized that what I had thought to be the path of least resistance, wasn’t. And while I knew I’d run into resistance with XCode and Objective-C as well, at least I’d be doing things the “proper” way and learning new stuff.

So I fired up XCode once again and set out to write a Mac application. The following is a bunch of notes and stray thoughts I scribbled down during those first hours - my first (well, fourth) impressions of developing iApps coming from Ruby.

XCode

• Oh dear God, so many windows. I can see why Mac/iOS developers like to have multiple 30 inch screens.
• Inline error messages are kind of awesome.

The language

• Oh yeah, I remember why I’ve tried figuring this out on more than one occasion.
• Oh no, semicolons.
• Is there something like TryRuby for Objective-C? I think it would be easier getting started not having to worry about XCode and Interface Builder and outlets and other blah.

Interface Builder

• Not sure if I should hate it or love it.
• When I rename a file via Interface Builder why doesn’t it change the import statements or other references. I thought this was what an IDE should be doing.
• Finding good, up to date introductory articles is hard, and it seems Interface Builder changes quite a bit between versions making it hard to transfer instructions from another version.

Files and structure

• I miss something like Rails to force a structure on me. Where to I put this or that file? What’s my main application file called? ApplicationDelegate? AppController? Where do I put other things, what should I name them? Arg, best practice me, please!
• Seriously, do all files simply go in the same directory?
• Using git with XCode isn’t exactly a joy. Closing all files because git has changed them is annoying to say the least.

Debugging output

• I miss a consistent, robust way to log debug output. Object.to_s and .inspect of Ruby are awesome. NSLog() isn’t quite flexible enough, ie NSLog(@"%@") fails for certain types (integers).
• A visual debugger is nice, I remember that from my Delphi days.

Installing frameworks

• Download, run something, then copy something into a project, then add build phases, then import it. Damn, I miss gems.

I am sure I’ll laugh at the above as I get more experience. But this serves a nice reminder that starting anything new is a fragile situation and we should make sure newbies are welcomed and aided into our communities.