Slowly Diving Into Cocoa

A few months ago I posted a screenshot from NoteScratch, a Mac app that I was working on. Though the underlying idea of a note-taking application built for speed and readability is still as awesome as it ever was, my plan to develop it in MacRuby with no prior Cocoa experience (and very little Ruby experience for that matter) was hopelessly optimistic.

That said, the application does run, but I’ve had it running for four months now with no progress since then. It’s the simplest that a Mac app can really be, with no support for any of those little things that one comes to expect from a real application - recent files, using NSDocument so you can have multiple files open at once, the dot in the close button that tells you the file is modified… all that stuff. I have absolutely no idea how to implement any of it right now, either.

So, having admitted my Ruby and Cocoa incompetence, I’ve picked up Cocoa and Objective-C: Up and Running by Scott Stevenson. I’m going to read that book inside and out, assuming I can commit to it. I know absolutely no Objective-C, or even C (though I do know a bit of Java so it won’t be totally foreign), but I hope I can overcome that hurdle. After that, I’m going to create the NoteScratch app that everyone will love!

If you have Snow Leopard, you can try out what I’ve come up with so far. It’s not the great application that I want to build, but I’d like to get some opinions on the concept. Otherwise, I’m off to do some reading.