Red Hat Diaries/0041

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

Although you now know enough to write a Cocoa application, the truth of the matter is that we have only scratched the surface of what there is to learn. There are dozens of classes that we haven't explained. There are frameworks that we've only hinted at. There's a lot of functionality that we didn't include because, frankly, it still has bugs. And finally, there's the fact that Cocoa is still a work in progress, with Apple sure to make more changes.
  -- Simson Garfinkel & Mike Mahoney, 'Building Cocoa Applications'

'The fact that' is an especially debilitating expression. It should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs.
  -- William Strunk Jr & EB White, 'The Elements of Style'

After 597 pages of this huge opus by Simon & Garfunkel I happen upon the above quote. Very encouraging. Apple still does not have a professional programmer's guide to OS X.

Expectations were high. After the disappointment of Hillegass's book, and after the slight encouragement of KJ's work, this one could have been the one. At nearly 600 pages, and with an impressive TOC, it sure looked like it.

But when book real estate is wasted explaining what an operating system is, when nearly 100 pages are wasted explaining how to use the OS X interface (look out David Pogue), when a whole chapter is wasted revealing what Unix is, when page after page has complete console dumps of ps, the smile turns to a frown.

The text includes the original 'hello world' application which led off the free tutorial book on NS back in the old days, the drawing algorithm that became the basis of the XPT screen saver V'ger. It runs without help of Interface Builder, so you finally learn how to make an OS X window without using a dialog script. And there is mention of multithreading and pipes - one-way pipes to be sure, but pipes nonetheless.

But if you want the fancy stuff - if you are a professional programmer and want to assimilate all you know to this new platform, if you want to begin writing professional software, using all the features at your disposal - toolbars and drawers and synchronisation objects and all the rest - you will find little to build on.

Even Microsoft had a good book (not CP) back in the old days, Guide to Programming Windows (not NWK's either), back when MS and IBM were still holding hands. It predated toolbars but otherwise had everything. Today MS has a lot of ISV stuff for their platforms, and Apple desperately holds onto 5%. It's easy to see why.

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