My Summer
Much has happened since my last post, and I didn’t keep up the blogging – no shock there.
I managed to get my hands on a mint condition iMac for a very good price, it’s the model just before they made them silver. Nice little thing, the iMac, it would be nice to ditch the PC but it would be too expensive to replace with the equivalent Mac.
The first day of getting the Mac up and running saw me install Synergy and the iPhone SDK, everything I shall ever need for the Mac! Synergy is a pretty handy app, albeit a little painful to setup and install. This allows me to keep my desk clear and use the keyboard on my Windows machine to develop on the Mac too.
Within a few days development had begun on MovieStar (checkout my project page) – my native IMDb search tool. Prior this point I had no experience with Cocoa or Objective-C, besides the fact that I’d only used Mac’s occasionally. The first few weeks of getting to grips with the new language and development environment were hard, but the odd syntax gradually came to me.
The link between the Interface Builder and the code was a little hard to fathom at first, where if you accidently connect the wrong components or outlets the app just crashes with little clue as to why. This brings me on to XCode’s error handling – what’s going on there? The majority of crashes give you NO error message at all, XCode just starts up GDB and shrugs.
XCode isn’t all bad though, if you look past the fact you can’t rename a project easily. The API look up tool is pretty handy and I do like the code auto completion, although it’s a little hard to get used to coming from Netbeans and similar tools.
Expect to see MovieStar on the AppStore at the end of September of sometime in October – I hope!