Rick's World

I've been interested in programming on the Mac for a while - nearly since the day I bought my first Mac last year. Well after a year of off-again, on-again reading up on it, I've finally started working on my first small Mac application. As a programmer, you can read books all day, but you'll never really understand a programming language unless you use it to write a program with. It is then that everything you read finally starts to sink in. My application is very simple - it's only around 100 lines of actual code so far, but it's taken me quite a while to even get that far. I'm struggling with it, because I know next to nothing about programming on the Mac. I'm having to relearn even the most basic of operations. That means lots of trial and error and lots of hunting in the documentation to relearn how to do things I've been doing for many years. It's a bit frustrating. I'm making good progress though. I've already learned how to do drag & drop, how to do various file operations, how to make a custom drawn window, various string operations, etc. It's been a great learning project. I still have lots of other things to add to it, such as multithreading and displaying custom dialog boxes. Yes, you could argue that I'm making a very simple application harder than it needs to be, but the point here is to learn how to do these things. It's amazing to see just how simple the Mac makes it to do such complicated tasks as drag & drop.

Now, with the info Apple is releasing about the new development tools in their upcoming Leopard OS, I'm getting even more excited about the prospect of programming on the Mac. It has been a long time since I found Windows programming exciting. (and that's what I do for a living!)