macOS Hey all

[FireArse]

There may be a few threads out there that may share the same thoughts as this - but I wanted to make my point clear.



Developing for OS X is 10 times harder than for the windows platform. I mean. WTF. You wanna develop something for OS X? People tell you to develop in Cocoa. ok fine, ive porgrammed before - shouldn't be too hard to learn another Object-oriented language...

Nobody but Apple uses Objct-C, and what a waste of (enter abusive word here) time. You have to learn the NsArray BS or the fact that NSApplicationMain is the first thing that the program calls - but you didnt put it in there.

I mean F me. How fecking complicated can it be? Clicking and dragging to make actions between classes and the buttons on your app? WTF? Whats wrong with double-clicking FFS.
I have bought the two most referenced books for OS X dev and they're ok - they provide what looks like step-by step development in Cocoa - but they often miss that little VITAL step to make your ***** program work.

I must admit - I am a HUGE fan of the Mac platform, but having just starting to use .NET at work for the last two weeks - MS have made development on the win platform easy enough for a 10year old to do it. Jesus ***** Christ.

XCode looks pretty - but all the various windows just dont ***** work. one for the GUI, one for the code, one for the details of the object, another for the various buttons/menus. I have a 23' screen here and its a fecking pain having to look where i need to clicking.

To anyone thinking of Developing aps for OS X, dont ***** bother. dont waste your money on books or time on the crappy Cocoa (or C++ using Carbon) because some OS X devs are snotty arseh0les. Lots more help on win platform.

Anyone spending 5 mins on the apple Dev site would know WTF im going on about. Talk about over complicate EVERYTHING. And to top it off, Apple have a little area at the bottom of each page asking if the page helped in your query. What a waste of time

C++ is a MUCH nicer language to work with.

What a shame, a real shame.

//rant over

 

[Catfish_Man]

That was awesome.


In the real world, once you get there, you'll find C++ is at least as complicated. Trying to learn how to use std::vector should be an interesting experience for someone who can't figure out something as trivially easy as NSArray.

As to the Mac community not being helpful... perhaps you should try being a bit more polite. If you look at this very forum (which is not the best resource for programming), half the front page is topics with people helping new programmers.

<edit> btw, every statement in your post is incorrect except the one about NSApplicationMain(). </edit>

 

[kainjow]

I must admit - I am a HUGE fan of the Mac platform, but having just starting to use .NET at work for the last two weeks - MS have made development on the win platform easy enough for a 10year old to do it.

.NET is a joke for real world development though. Sure, it's very easy, especially anyone with a Java background where C# is just a blatant ripoff (and don't get me started with VB.NET).

But when it comes down to distributing your .NET application compared to distributing your Cocoa application, Cocoa/Apple/OS X wins hands down 100%. Microsoft screws over .NET developers by not including the .NET framework, so all your potential users must download a massive 22MB app and hassle with the joy that brings.

Where in comparison the Cocoa frameworks are built-in to the operating system. Only thing you have to worry about is the slight differences from each OS.

 

[Catfish_Man]

.NET is a joke for real world development though. Sure, it's very easy, especially anyone with a Java background where C# is just a blatant ripoff (and don't get me started with VB.NET).

I rather like C# actually. There's even a few OSX apps using it.

 

[kainjow]

Here's an interesting article about a Delphi programmer who switched:

http://www.frater.com/blog/2006/10/goodbye-windows-dev-hello-apple.html

 

[berniemac]

It's Visual Studio that makes programming on Windows easy, not C++ or even C#. (Try writing a C# application in Notepad if you don't believe me.)

Apple is making good progress with XCode and is catching up. Despite that, I think it will always be more difficult to develop on OS X. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing though.

 

[Catfish_Man]

It's Visual Studio that makes programming on Windows easy, not C++ or even C#.

A good IDE makes programming less tedious, and less prone to trivial errors, not really easier. Hard things (fast collision detection in 3d, simulation of complex systems, efficient data compression, good security, etc...) are still hard. Good APIs help a lot with that by letting you reuse other people's solutions, but that only applies to general-purpose solutions.

 

[berniemac]

I don't think FireArse is complaining about the difficulty of implementing a physics engine. His problem is that in Visual Studio you can double-click a button and Visual Studio will add the function, add a message handler for the button, and take you right to that function to begin coding.

To do the same thing in XCode you have to create a class, open the inspector, add an action, create an instance of the class, ctrl-click drag, close Interface Builder, then open the source file to begin coding.

It took me a while to get this sequence down but it doesn't seem so bad now.

 

[ExoticFish]

i keep running into problems understanding Cocoa, but after a long time trying to figure it out it finally clicks and i understand it. From my experience .Net makes some things easier, but so does Cocoa... except Cocoa is much more understandable once you get the hang of how the whole ball of wax fits together.

 

[FireArse]

It's Visual Studio that makes programming on Windows easy, not C++ or even C#. (Try writing a C# application in Notepad if you don't believe me.)

Apple is making good progress with XCode and is catching up. Despite that, I think it will always be more difficult to develop on OS X. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing though.

First off, I'd like to apologise for the rant last night - it was getting late, and i was quickly turning irate. haven't been so frustrated on my Mac before.

Now, another Apology - the title to the thread is crappy (any way to change it?) it has no link to the subject of the thread. Need to work on making them clearer!

I agree that Visual Studio makes life very easy. Far easier than XCode. I will have another bash at it later on tonight - just wish someone at an Apple retail store knew anything about XCode. There was one guy up in Manchester who was starting off like me - but I'm not sure how he's doing. He was a Mac Genius and was a very pleasant chap.

I'll have another bash tonight. Meanwhile, I'm making mince meat out of a new project here in C++ on the windows platform for work. gggrrrrrr

 

[caveman_uk]

I will have another bash at it later on tonight - just wish someone at an Apple retail store knew anything about XCode.

Why do you expect them to know that? Do people at PC World know anything about Visual Studio? Or indeed any retail store.

The proportion of visitors to an Apple store that are devs (particularly in the UK) must be absolutely tiny. As far as I can see, the majority of people visiting the Apple Store in Regent Street are just there to ponce off the free internet access....

 

[Sayer]

Interface Builder, until 10.5 "Leopard", is almost unchanged UI-wise from the Nextstep days.

Yes it is tedious to have to instantiate a class and control-drag to link objects.

However, in the real world, you give your classes custom names (and you have tons of them to name), and you do that from the UI down in Xcode/IB. So you make the UI, name all your classes and methods there, and when you get to Xcode all the files are populated with all the methods and classes you already entered.

How is that so much harder?

And this was the same way as with NeXTStep way back in the 90's, long before MS ripped off Java to make C# and .NET or VisualStudioWhatever.

IB is finally updated in 10.5, but with so little public info on what was changed it is hard to say how "modern" it really is (compared to whatever MS is doing). Personally I don't care about TimeMachine, I want to know about Xcode and IB - the two things Apple has spent the LEAST amount of time/web pages discussing. Which is ironic considering all the Leopard previews are targeted at developers primarily.

 

[caveman_uk]

IB is finally updated in 10.5, but with so little public info on what was changed it is hard to say how "modern" it really is (compared to whatever MS is doing). Personally I don't care about TimeMachine, I want to know about Xcode and IB - the two things Apple has spent the LEAST amount of time/web pages discussing. Which is ironic considering all the Leopard previews are targeted at developers primarily.

You should bear in mind that the people who (legally) have the Leopard beta already have the new xCode and IB so know rather more about it. The dev tools were also discussed at WWDC.

 

[GeeYouEye]

You should bear in mind that the people who (legally) have the Leopard beta already have the new xCode and IB so know rather more about it. The dev tools were also discussed at WWDC.

Indeed! I don't think it's against the NDA to simply say: it rocks.

Of course, I think the current IB rocks, so...

 

[FireArse]

Why do you expect them to know that? Do people at PC World know anything about Visual Studio? Or indeed any retail store.

The proportion of visitors to an Apple store that are devs (particularly in the UK) must be absolutely tiny. As far as I can see, the majority of people visiting the Apple Store in Regent Street are just there to ponce off the free internet access....

I expect at least one 'Genius' to know a little about how to write a Cocoa App. I mean, they have ppl there for multi-media apps and have lectures on how to use iTunes, iMovie and whatever.

one 'Genius' to know a little on Cocoa is all i'm asking.

Anyway. Having worked for DSG (who own Currys, PC World and what used to be known as Dixons) I know that the staff there know F all about developing - however, they dont claim to be 'Geniuses' or walk around the store asking if you want to be lectured (in a good way) about software on the platform.

 

[Cromulent]

I actually found programming on the Mac 10X easier than on the PC. I never did get the hang of the Windows API.

Just be thankful you are not using MPW if you think Xcode is bad .

 

[Soulstorm]

Cocoa development may seem complicated at first, but it is far more flexible than any other development environment (apart from Carbon, but that's another story). Personnaly, I thnk thhat the technologies implemented into the API are amazing. CoreData, Cocoa Bindings, all these features and many more will save you time, money and much of the the infamous and error-prone 'glue code'.

What FireArse can't realise is that although for small projects something easier would indeed be nice, the same pattern is used for larger projects, and while the programming style remains the same, you can have a full-featured proffessional application using the same pattern that you use for your 'small' projects.

Cocoa also saves you code. I am lurking around in other programming forums, too, and really, the amount of extra code PC users need to get their apps working, while having the same features as a Mac application is really large!

I may have to program in Windows sometime, but my opinion is that OS X development has the most flexible design pattern with very little effort hands down.

 

[gnasher729]

one 'Genius' to know a little on Cocoa is all i'm asking.

I'm sure there is _one_ genius who knows about Cocoa, but which country does she or he live in?

Seriously, ADC is for developers, not retail stores.