I’ve been curious about what Mac OS X Cocoa development is like and I’ve heard some folks say that Xcode is a nice IDE so I decided to play around with it a bit.

I went through Apple’s Introduction to Cocoa Application Tutorial Using Objective-C and it was fairly interesting.

Xcode is an interesting IDE. Most of the work of constructing the sample application in the tutorial was constructing the user interface with Interface Builder, which is pretty slick, although there was an annoyance or two like how it defaults all the menu items with the application name in the caption to use “NewApplication” instead of the chosen application name (“Currency Converter”), and then makes you change each one individually. The concepts of outlets and actions were interesting as well as the idea of creating these connections graphically, even though it seemed perhaps more tedious than just simply writing code. The tutorial felt like a lot of clicking and dragging and very little writing of code, but I admit that it was pretty easy and seamless. I do think that the open-source Eclipse IDE, which I’ve started to explore a bit recently, might be more my style, though, with all of the plugings (e.g.: CDT and PHPEclipse) and refactoring features.

The other weird thing was getting my head wrapped around Objective-C, which is like C with OO features and dynamic typing of Smalltalk slapped on top of it.