Magnus Blog

I was reading some old posts, and I realize I promised you an update on Cocoa. You shall receive it. But first a few other things.

First of all, this post is posted through MarsEdit, which is a very nice piece of software, which will soon be out in a new version. Unless something very unexpected happens, I’ll be buying MarsEdit soon, because I think it might make me blog more, which anyone who checks the front page knows doesn’t happen enough. Oh, and you might also want to check out the rest of the products on that site. There’s plenty of awesomeness.

Secondly, there will be some changes pretty soon. I and Johan of Comme-ci, comme ça fame will soon be blogging together on our company blog. I am reluctant to tell you a lot about it yet, but great things are abound. I will post a link once the blog is up. In the foreseeable future, this blog will hopefully receive some love, in the form of a redesign and a name change. I have some ideas, but I will not tell you a lot about that either.

There are also some changes in my life that some of you know about, and I will post about those once the ink is on the paper, so to speak.

So, regarding Cocoa. It’s awesome. Not that I’m great at coding in Cocoa yet, but Cocoa is a great framework, and I feel that I have come a long way since last October. Although perhaps that is expected. I don’t know exactly what to say, I can make simple apps, and with some more time more complicated apps.

Perhaps an incomplete list of hurdles is a good idea? First of all, and crucial to get over is the memory management system. If you do not understand this you program will leak memory, and you’ll probably have a couple of over-release bugs. Thankfully, it’s not that hard once you understand it. Just make sure to couple every retain with a release. And autorelease when necessary. And remember the rules regarding when objects are returned autoreleased and not.

Another hurdle is Cocoa Bindings. Bindings is an awesome system, but it’s still a bit tricky to understand. You don’t actually need bindings, but it’ll save you a lot of code. Just read the docs until you understand it and you’ll be set.

Well… That’ll be it for now.

Oh, and today or tomorrow (probably tomorrow, considering the time of posting ) , I’m going out to picks chanterelles.