Otter Software

One of the advantages of being a newcomer to Cocoa is that I can make my life easier (albeit at the expense of a few potential users) and concentrate on Leopard-only code and ignore all of those previous version of OS X that have gone before. A result of this, however, is needing to tell a user who has downloaded your application that they need a more recent version of OS X or even simply that they need to update from, say, version 10.5.2 to 10.5.4. This can be quickly and easily achieved via SystemVersionCheck by Chris Campbell which you can download from http://homepage.mac.com/chris_campbell/blog/SystemVersionCheck-1.1.html. The web page also explains the theory behind SystemVersionCheck and gives great step-by-step instructions for integrating it into your own applications.

As a new Cocoa developer I have two main target platforms I can develop applications for: OS X and the iPhone OS. Of the two the iPhone OS is the one with all of the buzz. It’s a new and exciting platform full of business opportunities as proven by Apple reporting the fact that there had been over 100,000,000 downloaded from the App Store within the first 60 days of it being launched [Apple PR Article]. Unfortunately it is also the platform which is attracting all the controversy amongst the developer community.

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As a new Cocoa developer I’ve spent a fair amount of time ferreting around for useful books, web sites, podcasts and blogs, forums and discussion lists and looking into source code repositories. This article will highlight some of the best that I have found to date and will be the first post in my ‘Resources’ category. There are a several more books that I have and many more sites and blogs that I visit but these are some of the key ones so they get mentioned first. [Read the rest of this entry...]

I have been teaching myself all-things Cocoa since April 2008 and I have been extremely fortunate in that I have been doing this at work which has given me the time to really get my teeth into it. During the past couple of years I have attempted to get to grips with Objective-C, XCode, Interface Builder, etc. a few times but I always had to abandon my attempts due a lack of free time and the simple fact that, coming from a VB6 background, I really struggled to get my head around it all. However, earlier this year my employer decided that we would develop some Mac software and since I had been using a Mac at home for a few years and had just finished work on another project the task became mine.

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