A former Windows developer has just about given up and has been reinventing himself as a Mac developer. The anonymous writer has provided tips and background for those wishing to do the same at RegDeveloper in the UK.
"This article is aimed at Windows developers who are considering making the move. The idea is to get you up to speed as quickly as possible with mainstream Mac development," the developer wrote.
Of course, every developer who starts on the Mac must first grapple with Objective-C, and this developer was no different. Some of the idiosyncrasies of the language were briefly discussed and compared to C++. There are a few syntax and nomenclature issues to get under control.
The next natural step is to discuss Cocoa. The author clarified some misconceptions surrounding the Cocoa development system. "Basically, a Cocoa application is one that makes use of the AppKit and Foundation frameworks. Itis typically written in Objective-C, but could be written using any language which has bindings capable of accessing these Objective-C frameworks. Itis typically created using the XCode development system but ? again ? you can use command-line tools if you wish."
Thatis a very important clarification and contrasts with some errors in the presentation he found at Wikipedia.
In a future article, the author intends to delve into Xcode and Interface Builder, and do it from the perspective of the Win32 RAD programmer.