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Modern Mac Development?
CDarklock asks: "I'm getting seriously interested in setting a new Mac next to my Windows box (to replace the Mac SE, which should tell you about how long it's been). But on Linux and Windows, I'm accustomed to writing lots of custom apps in C++ to fill the gaps around the system, but I haven't written anything on a Mac for something like fifteen years. As a professional Windows developer, what sort of expense am I facing to outfit a new Mac with development tools comparable to Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET, and what sort of learning curve should I expect?"
As for the learning curve, it may take some time to get used to things being done differently in OS X, but moving from C++ to Java isn't too difficult if you choose to use Java Cocoa.
Objective C is generally a better bet for Cocoa development, but it will have a slightly steeper learning curve, since the syntax is significantly different.
Other than the change of language, the Cocoa frameworks might take a while to learn, but the documentation is very good.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Your problem is managing to impede the Mac sufficiently to make it no better than .NET.
(Okay, so I am a recent convert.)
I don't know how well it measures up against Visual Studio, but I for one love X-Code. It's a nice IDE, useful but not over done. X-Code and a number of other development tools come with OS X (and are avaible at no charge from the Apple Developer Network website). X-Code uses gcc and gdb for compiling and debugging. You can use it to code C, C++, Objective C and others. As far as coding goes, it sounds like you'll really want to learn Cocoa. Cocoa is the core set of OS X frameworks (think MFC, only much, much better). There are Cocoa bindings Java and a few other langs, but ideally you'll want to use Objective C. Obj C is a great language, much easier to learn than C++, and in my opinion a joy to program. Good luck.
Apple ships OS X with a developer tools CD. That's where you will want to start. It will give you most of your basic gnu development tools, along with Xcode (a decent IDE which is getting better with every revision) and some mac-specific profiling tools.
The next step is to sign up for the Apple Developer Connection. It has many membership levels ranging from free (so you can download developer tool updates) to very expensive. Update your compiler and tools to the latest version using this service.
If you like Java, downloading Eclipse might be a good way to go. I haven't used Eclipse much, but have enjoyed all of my experiences with it on OS X.
You will also want to install either Darwin Ports or Fink. These are package management systems that are based on BSD Ports and apt (respectively). I'm partial to Darwin Ports, but both systems have their strengths and weaknesses.
If you want dead-tree documentation, the two books to start off with are "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" by Aaron Hillegass and "Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming" by Mark Dalrymple and Aaron Hillegass. These guides are thorough, and the authors have been part of the Objective-C/Cocoa community since the Next days, and give good tutorials on what is the Mac philosophy of software development.
Another option for an IDE, which has decent but dated interfaces to the OS X world is CodeWarrior. I know a bunch of developers who swear by the CodeWarrior development platform. I really couldn't get into it myself, but it seems to have a nice toolkit for cross-platform development.
Have fun!
The middle mind speaks!
Why is it too bulky? It offers automated CVS/SVN support, greatly helps organize files without needlessly creating a thousand folders to store your files in, builds everything as you ask it to, and offers instant support at your fingertips. XCode is awesome if you know how to use it correctly.
But, if you are a C or Perl hacker who likes doing things from the command line, that's quite alright as well. If you're programming on the Mac, you're most likely making a GUI for something UNIXie already, so you're probably going to want to use XCode, if not for its instant support to Carbon documentation, than for source code highlighting and autocomplete (which isn't as good as Visual Studio's autocomplete, but it gets the job done).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass is an excellent place to start learning how to use all the cool Mac-specific stuff.
Everyone has (and will continue) to discuss Xcode.
.NET web apps at work on XP but have a Mac at home. there are a good many differences:
.Net and it is way different developing .Net apps with the IDE in Visual Studio. I have developed php apps on the Mac and used TextEdit and BBedit (a great OS X only editor). IMHO, seasoned coders who really know their stuff will do well transitioning from VS.net, beginers will have a few less crutches to use.
I can give some insight into the question of learning curve.
I develop
- The mac is like Linux. Get used to the Linux command line. If you don't know basic commands like LS instead of DIR then the curve will be steap. If you have used a *nix system or are a quick study, I would pickup an O'reilly book and get up to speed with things like user permissions (CHMOD) and GREP and the Pipe "|" for automation. Also know than things like Chron jobs replace Windows Scheduler. Get a book adn take the few hours to skim it. It will be a great reference if nothing else.
- Perpare yourself for more text editor usage and less sophisticated Integrated Developer Environment (IDE). Okay, let the Apple Xcoders begin their flame. I really feel that MS got some things very very right with Visual Studio
- You're gonna need an office suite. MS Office.X is great, but for the money, I kinda like OO.o and use NeoOffice/J myself. A Mac alternative to Visio is OmniGraffle and is better IMHO.
- Get used to few, but higher quality choices. Okay, this one is touchy too but there are few fewer choices for software and websites to Google for a problem but the ones you do find for whatever the task might be are of better quality I think. Apple does a great many things right the first time so even if an article is written for Jaguar, it may very well work under Tiger, etc. I have found this very frustrating as I try to install something under IIS 6 with a document written for IIS 5 for example.
- Don't underestimate the hardware. Okay, your budget, your choice, but I would be more inclined to recommend to a serious developer buying a Power Mac (watch out, rumors of new updates in May so careful with the timing) over a Mac mini. The Mac mini is great for a home user wanting to check email, but if you are going to develop, compile, and potentially deploy Web Objects and such, don't underestimate the G5's supperiority to it's 32-bit father. At a minimum, follow all the recommendations and get 512mb ram (I have a Gig and use it).
Lastly, "Welcome".
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Probably, but if not you can get the Tiger DVD sent to you for $9.95.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/
There is more to developing on a Mac than downloading Xcode.
I think the thread is worth exploring. There is a learning curve to moving from Windows to OS X in general, and more to learn when switching as a developer. The move from Linux to OS X is far less of a curve, but still exists.
Let's give the thread a chance!
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Is all you need to write the sort of apps that you were talking about.
Xcode, as every other post has said, is free.
Wrt books, I'd recommend "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, 2nd ed", by Aaron Hillegass. Aaron has a lot of experience teaching NextStep, WebObjects and OS X development, and his book reflect that experience. It is excellent - much better than the O'Reilly offerings I've seen. Big Nerd Ranch also has a book about programming the underpinnings of OS X called "Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming." Haven't seen this version book yet, but apparently it's the spiffed up, published version of BNR's student guide, so I'd bet it's pretty well done. You can get both together for $96.20 from Amazon.
There are other good references, tutorials, as well, some free on-line, and some for purchase. Do some Googling and mining on Amazon or B&N to find one that suits your purposes.
BTW, OS X has some very strong scripting capabilities built in that you might find useful for the kinds of apps you typically develop. And, as someone else noted, Ruby and other cool hacking languages come shipped with OS X and work well with XCode. Also, Eclipse, with all its goodness, runs nicely on OS X.
Lastly, if you want to put the limitations of "modern" programming languages behind you and get back to the future of software development, OS X has some of the best OSS Lisp implementations. SBCL or OpenMCL (if you want to do Cocoa apps), plus SLIME and Emacs is all a real programmer needs, and it's all free. *grynn*
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
My three main bookmarks for Cocoa help right now are:
o rum/. htm
http://rentzsch.com/
http://www.idevapps.com/f
http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/x2004-12-05b
The main challenges with Cocoa are learning how to navigate project builder so as to connect things up, and figuring out all the undocumented interdependencies between Cocoa objects.
One of the things that really screwed me up for a long time was not realizing that the UI objects aren't re-entrant, so if you call a UI object from a thread other than the main thread, you're likely to get random crashes.
The biggest thing for me though was figuring out project builder - figuring out how outlets and actions work. This is particularly a problem because there's no file you can edit to do outlets and connections - you have to do it with the GUI, and it's extremely counterintuitive. Once you figure it out it's easy, though. So it's good to just type your way through a couple of tutorials just to get the hang of it.
If you want to look at some example source code, I have something up on sourceforge that's (a) not trivial, but (b) not heinously complex, so it might be worth looking at. http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/gofer
try
http://pyobjc.sourceforge.net
If you're serious about Mac OS X development and want to write applications which blend in well with the Mac environment (necessary if you expect Mac users to actually want to use your applications) then you must learn how Mac applications are supposed to look and behave and figure out how to apply the Human Interface Guidelines to your application. (Note that the HIG is not always 100% accurate .. there are places where you should deviate from it slightly in order to match what Apple's apps do.) This is important, as if you do anything unMaclike then your application will be bashed as a bad Windows port (even if you wrote it from scratch) and no Mac users will touch it.
.. it is much improved.) Carbon is straight C code, and the concepts involved are more similar to Windows or X11 than Cocoa's design. But it's big and complicated, and would take a long time to learn. Also, there's a lot more stuff that you have to do in Carbon to make your application behave properly.
... they no longer promote the use of Java in Cocoa.
... well, the Xcode IDE and all the GNU tools (gcc, gdb, etc.) come with Mac OS X, so you shouldn't need to buy anything.
You have two ways to go in terms of APIs. Cocoa and Carbon. Cocoa is a refined version of NeXT's OpenStep. Carbon is a cleaned up version of the old Classic Mac OS API (but with a huge number of changes
Cocoa gives you most of the behavior for free. You'll write less code, and you'll probably end up with a more Mac-like application. (It's entirely possible to write a a well-behaved Carbon app, but you'll have a lot more to learn in order to do it right, as fewer things are done for you automatically.)
With Cocoa you'll have to learn Objective C. This is not a big deal. If you know C, then you can learn the handful of additions which comprise Objective C in less than an hour. It's a very simple language.
Theoretically you can program Cocoa apps in Java, but I do not suggest that you attempt this. Java does not really fit into the Cocoa model very well (it's not nearly dynamic enough) and was shoehorned in as a way to attract developers who refused to learn ObjC. This was a mistake on Apple's part, and they seem to have realized it
I strongly recommend that you spend some time with Hillegass's book on Cocoa. Objective C an elegant language, and is certainly the fastest way to develop Mac applications.
If you are a diehard C++ fan, then you may be better off with Carbon, but there will probably be a bigger learning curve as the Carbon libraries are more complex. (Carbon has a long complicated history, from its Pascal roots and old Classic Mac OS constructs (resource forks, FSspecs, Gworlds, etc.) and repeated changes in design (GetNextEvent() replaced by WaitNextEvent() and then Carbon Events, QuickDraw replaced by Color QuickDraw and now by Quartz 2D) so it takes quite a while to figure it all out.
I'd give ObjC and Cocoa a chance first. You can always use Objective-C++ to combine an ObjC user interface with a C++ backend, if you need to port old code. Be sure to check out MacSTL as it provides some nifty stuff to treat some Core Foundation and Foundation objects in an STL manner.
As for tools
-- Tim Buchheim
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Whether or not it's comparable is debatable, but every copy of OSX includes XCode, which is a full suite of graphical and command line development tools: programs, libraries, examples, and copious documentation. And it's free.
So there's that.
Additionally, if you get a copy of Tiger -- which a Mac bought now should either include or be eligible for an upgrade to -- then you get Dashboard, which will let you develop small desktop applications using, as I understand it, Javascript as the development language.
So there's also that.
Additionally, if you get a copy of Tiger, you will get Automator, which is a kind of graphical scripting application that can do all kinds of things. From what I can tell, it is going to be great in all the ways that the appropriately-acronymed AppleScript Studio wasn't.
So there's that, too.
Plus, every version of OSX has supported the full range of Unix shells and scripting languages, so you can write command-line, X11, and sometimes Aqua-based graphical applications using languages such as Perl, Python, Ruby, the Bourne shell, etc.
So to top it all off, there's that.
And to drive the point home, you get all of this for free with every Mac. I've heard nice things about Visual Studio, and maybe there's a lot it can do that the Mac side doesn't have, but I strongly suspect that the full range of programming, scripting, and automation tools available on the Mac will run rings around it without costing you a dime more than the cost of the computer [and OS, if you're upgrading, which you won't be in this case].
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
>>XCode is far too bulky
As compared to Visual Studio?!? Woah.
Visit these sites:
CocoaBuilder for the Mac OS X and Cocoa developer list archives.
CocoaDev is a Cocoa developer Wiki.
I find that 99% of the questions I have can be answered by these two resources (especially newbie type questions -- which you're bound to have in a new development environment.)
-ch
It sounds like you had unreasonable expectations for XCode, and they weren't met. And now you think it's the tool's fault for being nothing more than what it is.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
>On OSX, the platform -- not counting the Unix foundation -- is young
.NET is even younger still.
Are you kidding? Cocoa is based on NeXTStep, which has been actively refined since the late 80's. Win32 dates from the early 90's, and
Interface Builder, the primary Cocoa/NeXTStep GUI tool, was the first of it's kind. I saw it for the first time in 1989.
The class library that makes up Cocoa is one of the most mature frameworks out there.
Apple has a free mini-book that intros Objective-C and gives a good feel for its capabilities:
ObjC.pdf
I highly recommend it to anyone coming from a C++ or Java background who is wondering what the big deal about Cocoa is.
And if this little PDF catches your Fancy, Aaron Hillegass has an excellant book: "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X". Another good book is "Building Cocoa Applications" by Garfinkel and Mahoney.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Just wrote these today, coincidentally... 10. All the blue-coloured widgets and background images are good for the soul. 9. You can keep a Terminal.app window open and pretend to be a Unix hacker. 8. Crappy enterprise data access support means no horrible database programming. 7. People will think you're some kind of artist or writer or something else less socially leper-ous than being a programmer. 6. Interface Builder's NeXTStep heritage will force you into a Model-View-Controller architecture so strongly that even design-as-you-go nitwits like me will be saved from their own poor planning. 5. No matter what you do, Wired will eventually write a feature story about you. 4. All the built-in eye candy and automatic alignment guides will make you look like you know something about UI design. 3. The development tools don't cost more than what your stupid shareware program will probably earn you. 2. The Indian programmer who stole your Windows coding job can't afford to buy a Mac. 1. Chicks dig iBooks.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
If you want help programming, plenty of people have given links. If you want help with the interface end of things, try using some of the best Apple applications and see how things "work"--iTunes, The Omni Group, Bare Bones Software, Lemkesoft's Graphic Converter, Rancho's NetNewsWire. There are many others, but trying these on should give you a feel for what makes a great Mac App. Also, it is a commonly-perceived problem that there is no great mac Word-processing software. There are acceptable entries, including MS Office, and several others, but this is one area where OS X is gravely deficient (if you want to write the best Mac WP ever, feel free! I'd even buy a copy).
Lots of people (i.e., Windows & Linux Fanpersons) will deride many interface trends as "fluff"; do not make this mistake. Apple is pretty careful about what stuff they include, and while there might be a few things in there for no real reason (animated screensavers as you desktop background?), most of the "fluff" has a damn good reason to be there.
Further, if memory serves, it's actually syntactic sugar for objc_msgSend( object, "methodcall:", parameter );
Of course, if you actually use it that way outside the debugger, I hear Steve Jobs personally flies to your house and takes your Mac away from you.
YLFIOne god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
As so many others have pointed out, Xcode won't cost you a cent beyond whatever you decide to spend on a Mac (which could be anywhere from $500 to $3000, depending on you). And there are lots of free resources for learning about Mac programming, and lots of books.
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If you want to get a taste of the cutting edge of Mac development, however, go to developer.apple.com and buy yourself a ticket to Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, a.k.a. WWDC. Depending on where you live, you may also need a plane ticket and a plane ticket and a hotel room or a pal in San Francisco that you can crash with. Anyway, at WWDC you'll meet a few thousand Mac developers and attend sessions given mostly by Apple engineers on
Attending WWDC is definitely not something you _need_ to do, particularly if you're just starting out. But it's a lot of fun, and you might just see stuff there that will make you decide to sell your PC.
If you decide to do it, do it soon. You can get a WWDC ticket now for $1295, but prices go up to $1595 on April 22.
All I have to say is that Apple documentation is very bad and mostly unhelpful. Learning Cocoa/Objective-C from oreilly is near useless. In fact I did 2 examples from it following its directions and havent used it since. Learning Objective-c and Cocoa to the point where an advanced reference is what you need is borderline trivial. I suggest not bothering with introductory texts and simply grab some examples work through them, muck around with adding a few controls to them and you will be all set.
Really, if you know C you will have no problem moving to Objective-C, and Cocoa is in my opinion very very intuitive making MFC look like a bastard child.
OK, I'm late to this thread, and no doubt you have a clear picture already. But I'm a long-standing Mac developer steeped in C++ who also recently bit the bullet and changed the way I program on the Mac (from Carbon/C++ to Cocoa/Objective-C). OK you may say, but that's not as big a leap as Windows to Mac... well, I think it is. There are very few overlapping APIs, unless you want to use Carbon within Cocoa, which so far I have found very little need for except a bit of bridging to QuickTime.
So: 1. XCode comes with the OS. It comprehensive, it's good. I'm still learning it, but the basics are easy to grasp and you can fill in the finer detail as you go along.
2. Objective-C is a VERY SMALL addition to C. You can learn it in half an hour especially if you know C++. The syntax might look odd at first glance but it works, it's consistent, and it's only syntax!
3. The framework (Cocoa) is huge, and takes longer to learn. However, again you can get going very quickly because XCode will build a fully functioning app for you with no coding at all, then you can use that as a base on which to experiment. Personally I'd suggest you do spend a bit of time experimenting without trying to build a huge new app first go, because there are different ways of doing things, some not as good as others. But gradually the picture becomes clear.
4. Get a book. I recommend Aaron Hillegass's tome - well written, easy to understand, the examples work, and it touches on a lot of useful areas of the framework though in some cases could do with a bit more depth. The O'Reilly book is not as good in my opinion, I found it only started to make good sense after I'd read Hillegass and actually tried out some coding.
5. Be prepared to be amazed at what Cocoa can do and how it works. After years of C++ grinding, Cocoa is a breath of fresh air to me. Objective C is so much to the point, but avoids all that syntactical cruft that C++ has. It makes me realise that half the code I've ever written was there just to keep the language happy, rather than contributing to my actual productivity. Objective C's method lookup is incredibly flexible and makes things possible that you wouldn't even think of in C++. In that respect a C++ background can be a liability - many things turn out to be much simpler to do te Objective-C way than what you might think of at first. For me this was one of the steepest aspects to the learning curve, but also one of the biggest revelations. For example, look at how Undo is handled - it's gobsmackingly easy. After a while you'll start to wonder why other platforms don't have anything like this. Cocoa is what Java could and should have been.
6. Enjoy yourself - it's fun to program in Cocoa. Once you get on top of it you may find, as I have, that your programming ambition suddenly increases enormously. With Cocoa I feel I COULD write a Photoshop killer, if I wanted to....
You know Model-View-Controller? Interface Builder is a tool to build the view, and tie it to the classes of your application. Before Cocoa Bindings and Core Data, you would create a custom controller class or two, and connect them up. This button fires this action, which calls this method of MyAppController. MyAppController updates the model, then does some updates to the view. Grueling, thankless glue code.
Cocoa Bindings are a set of generic controllers, coupled with some tools in the IDE, that let you bind the view to the model in various complex ways while writing no boilerplate glue code. Say you have an array of objects in your data model. Cocoa Bindings lets you use an NSArrayController and a couple of straightforward bindings to say, "Fill this combobox with the 'name' field of each object in this array, and when a selection is made, populate these other fields with their other properties."
Core Data, though you didn't ask, is a set of generic tools that take care of the model, and gives you things like data persistence, undo, etc. for free. With Core Data and Cocoa Bindings together, you can go so far as to build UI scaffolding -- you literally drag one of the entities from your data model into a blank window in interface builder, and it builds a prototype interface for you. Not one you'd want to actually use, of course, but it gets you going and makes for a nice demo (see: Ruby on Rails hoopla).
As you might imagine, these tools take care of a lot of the grunt work of building graphical applications.