programming.cindycullen.com

As I mentioned on my other blog, my friend who works at Apple recommended that I start with Aaron Hillegass’ book, ‘COCOA Programming for Mac OS X’. And so I am.

I’ve only gotten through a couple of pages, but so far this book is really working for me. I’ve been programming a long time, but never for Mac products. Mostly for Mainframe, DOS, and Windows early in my career and then with Linux and web development languages such as php, mysql, ajax and javascript. So, COCOA and Objective-C are similar but definitely different.

Xcode is really cool. It provides me all the tools I need as a developer. And anything that isn’t included with Xcode is somewhere in the developer directory on my hard drive. It all came with my Snow Leopard DVD. If you don’t have Snow Leopard, it’s probably on your older version Mac OS X CD or DVD.

Once installed, I have a /Developer folder in my root. Inside that folder is an applications folder – /Developer/Application – where I found Xcode.

Today, in less than an hour, I finished building a random number generator App for my Mac. It’s very basic, but it’s a complete app. I only had to add a couple of lines of code to make a complete application complete with basic menu bar and items. And it works!! Pretty cool!

I think I’m going to like this!