Moritz Beutel <Moritz Beutel a __crit :

> FWIW, I'd really appreciate some kind of document that points out the
> advantages XCode has over other environments. Such advantages clearly
> seem to exist since many Mac programmers praise XCode, but I never
> found more precise explanations. I don't have Mac experience, but I've
> developed with VS, Delphi/C++Builder, Eclipse and other common tools,
> and I think many people around here have similar presets, so if you
> know an article that somehow covers XCode's assets for Mac newbies I'd
> be happy to read it.

I don't know, off hand, of any such document.


My experience has been that, as a Mac newbie, I really didn't know what 
I was doing with Xcode and ended up just getting frustrated and hoping 
it wouldn't be long before somebody brought out a VS or Delphi for Mac.


However, as I used to do when I first got to know about Delphi, I have 
set myself the challenge of doing presentations, on Mac development, for 
the UK Developers Group (used to be the Borland Users Group). I did one 
a few months ago; I had copied a lot of the code from other articles and 
wasn't really sure what a lot of it did and ended up giving a very good 
impression of someone who really didn't know what she was talking about ;-)


I am presently preparing for another presentation for February. This 
time, I am writing an article (more like a small book!) with a detailed 
account of how to create a simple application, to accompany the 
presentation.


The object model consists of a Word class with one string and one 
Language properties, and a Language class that just has one string property.


The application has a main form that browses a list of Word objects, has 
a second form for browsing and editing a list of Language objects and 
dialogs for creating and editing Word objects.


In the process of writing the article I have found out all sorts of 
interesting and useful things about using Xcode, Interface Builder, 
ObjectiveC and the Cocoa libraries.


You may remember that I wrote a MVP (Model View Presenter) framework, 
starting in Delphi and then ported to C#. Apple's development 
environment and the Cocoa libraries have strong connections with the 
same Taligent MVP frameworks that I based my frameworks on so, now I 
have started to get to know how to use the IDE, everything has started 
to fall into place and, instead of having to work very hard to get 
Delphi or Visual Studio to accomodate the MVP patterns, I am finding it 
a lot easier to use Xcode.


But, as for being easy for an experienced Windows programmer but a Mac 
newbie...


Joanna


-- 
Joanna Carter [TeamB|http://www.teamb.com]
Consultant Software Engineer