Dipping my toes into Cocoa again

Last time I did any significant Cocoa programming was prototyping a Installer-plug-in-style modular pane system for implementing one’s own Setup Assistant, in our case, a Mac Office Setup Assistant. I think it was a toss-up between the Hypercard-like architecture of the system or the product ID field editor which I liked more. But I left the team to head to the CLR before it was complete, and it’s unclear how much of that work was used, cherry-picked, or thrown out for Mac Office 2008.

Since then, the clients of my code have almost all been C++, and my memories of .nibs and actions and outlets have faded. Last week, though, one of the partners using Cocoa reported an issue. I sat down to try and write a simple Cocoa version of our C++ client (with some actual UI) and knew enough to know I didn’t remember enough to sit down and do it. Perhaps if I had spent more than a few months developing Cocoa UI a few years back, it would have stuck better. I popped open my Cocoa® Programming for Mac® OS X (2^nd ed.), and bogged down nigh immediately: quite a bit had transpired in the Interface Builder world since 2004. I don’t remember any @prototype or @synthesize. So, I shelved the project, ordered the 3^rd edition (published in 2008), and worked on other projects.

Now that it’s arrived, I’m looking forward to sitting down with it, Xcode, and Interface Builder and making a simple CoreCLR loading application. It will have use beyond this simple reproduction case, I wager.