All good advice, I'm sure. Indeed, I've been programming on a wide variety of machines in a wide variety of programming languages with a w-v of library APIs for over 35 years. Cocoa has been among the hardest. I lack a mental model, an "ah ha" moment of intimate understanding that when I push there and pull here, I know what to expect. I suspect several weeks of immersion (following some of all the advice above) will do the trick. Yet, I have rarely needed such immersion. Cocoa has a very different model than everything else I've done.
As much as I hate M----s--t, my employer required me to write a desktop app in C# and .NET. The closest experience I could bring to bear was Java. That model was close enough, because combined with the MS IDE, excellent debugger, and the fairly fleshed-out .NET help, I was cooking quite fast. Faster than I was with Cocoa. I -still- feel I need to hit Big Nerd Ranch with a few weeks afterwards away from work and distractions.
I look forward to improvements in Leopard, but I'm not holding my breath for parity with .NET even then.
by Bob Peterson — Jun 05
As much as I hate M----s--t, my employer required me to write a desktop app in C# and .NET. The closest experience I could bring to bear was Java. That model was close enough, because combined with the MS IDE, excellent debugger, and the fairly fleshed-out .NET help, I was cooking quite fast. Faster than I was with Cocoa. I -still- feel I need to hit Big Nerd Ranch with a few weeks afterwards away from work and distractions.
I look forward to improvements in Leopard, but I'm not holding my breath for parity with .NET even then.