My friend Steven just launched this site. It is a site based on WordPress that will host video tutorials on how to use Cocoa called TeachMeCocoa.com. Currently it has just launched and only has one video Files and Collections which talks about different collection types and how to use them. It also discusses how to save and read data to and from files.

Steven is doing something great for the community by offering up these tutorials for free however he will accept donations. He mentioned that he needs better equipment such as a nice headset that will cancel out the background noise as he has a few little one’s running around.

I have yet to watch the first video but I am going to do that now. A BIG thank you goes out to Steven as I am in the process of learning and I AM SURE that these videos will be very helpful for me. Watch your donation box Steven

As most of you know I have been getting more and more into mac development in what free time I have (which is not much). I have actually learned a lot about it with the help of some great guys in #macdev on irc.freenode.net

I have been trying to keep up with what is happening in the Cappuccino world as well because while that is not technically mac development they are making it so that you can develop interactive web apps in much the same way you do Cocoa Applications.

If you are not sure who 280 North is or what exactly Cappuccino is you can check them out at http://280north.com/.

When I first heard of Cappucino I was intrigued by the idea of creating a framework like Cocoa based on JavaScript. I really wanted to see what they could do with it. I was first amazed by the application that 280 North had written with it called 280Slides. This is a very impressive application to have been written completely with JavaScript.

Yesterday 280 North revealed an application called 280Atlas. I have to say this is another very well put together application and once again I cannot believe all of this can be done via JS. Building applications like this is going to be very nice considering you can store data on the server but have all of the code for the application run on the client side in their browser window. They are really making Cappuccino development very much like Mac Development using Interface Builder for the interface. This is going to save developers a lot of time in the code.

This really makes me want to learn JavaScript and front-end stuff has never intrigued me at all.

Today Dylan came up to me and was talking to me about his Playstation Portable. He said “Joe, remember when we were at that house with the little girl who played my game?” I told him that I did and he said she lost my game. At first thought I checked all of the PSP game cartridges to make sure they were all accounted for. After a moment I realized he meant a saved game.

Now before I go on I have to explain that to dylan saving his game is hitting pause and turning the game system off. When he turns it back on it magically remembers your game and you can just un-pause.

After a moment of silence and calmly looking around he says “OH MAYBE SHE DIDN’T!!!” He starts looking around frantically. Oh yea the game is right here, maybe she didn’t lose the game he said. He opens the system and takes the game out… I laughed and said “Nope! But YOU just did!” his response was exactly as expected!

Over the last few weeks I have been using what spare time I have to learn Objective-C with Cocoa. While Objective-C has been easy coming from a PHP background the Cocoa frameworks have not. There are things in Cocoa Programming that I have to worry about that I did not have to even think about in PHP. Just a few of those things are Memory Management, The Main Run Loop, etc. I have never had to worry about any of that with PHP because the scripts are run and then destroyed. They do not take up memory and just hang around all day long. However if you are not careful with Objective-C you will have a lot of memory eaten up really quick.

Now I have been working on small apps mainly using NSBezierPath so that I can learn how to draw squiggles and straight lines by clicking the mouse just like you would with the pencil/brush or line tool in a paint application. While this really is boring to me I am being instructed to do this by a friend who is helping me along the Cocoa path.

So here’s a plug for him.

Steven Degutis
http://thoughtfultree.com/

If you want to support me learning Cocoa I cannot say buy my products but you could go buy his. He is a great developer and has been very helpful along the journey. His apps are very nice and are rather inexpensive also. You can get all of his apps for around $30 (at the time of writing this) or buy them individually.

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