I have been developing Windows applications since 1987 and have literally grown up with Microsoft. Every programming tool they ever produced, I've used, abused, loved, hated and above all, never asked Microsoft to make them any slower...
The .NET framework is HUGE and despite writing fairly complicated software for a living, I have hardly used 20% of all the classes in it.
Recently I have been tasked to port (scratch that -- completely rewrite) a Windows Mobile application onto the iPhone. Hey what fun -- I didn't even have a Mac. I registered with Apple, downloaded the SDK and then furiously (stubbornly) attempted to install Leopard on a Microsoft Virtual PC. Finally caved in and ordered an iMac.
I got the iMac on Monday, installed the iPhone SDK, compiled a Hello World application in Objective C (which is all new to me!!!) and went home happy.
Yesterday I spent all day watching "Getting Started" videos on Apple's Dev Centre, and reading documentation on-line.
Today I wrote the first page of my mobile application, and it worked! At this rate I will have nailed it down by the end of next week. The original Windows Mobile application took six man months to complete by comparison, and wont be nearly as fast or powerful as the one I am working on now.
Microsoft's Visual Studio may be much more mature (in theory at least it has been around since 1992) than XCode. But they keep rewriting it all from scratch every three years or so, thus it never achieves stability and reliability. Every new version brings a host of irritating unwanted "features" (known as "bugs" to all but those who work for Microsoft).
XCode is refreshingly simple yet very powerful. Such elegance! I think I'm falling in love...
If only I could write all my Desktop applications in XCode (using the Cocoa framework) and just choose to compile for Windows, Mac, or iPhone, then I can die happy in the knowledge that finally humans have evolved real intelligence!
Heck, if only 5% of the computer market belongs to Apple now, there's no reason why they shouldn't aim a little higher. The rest of us will switch quickly if Apple behaved a little less selfishly. In other words, Apple shouldn't use Microsoft as a role model. Just give us developers simpler and more reliable tools, that gives us portability to boot. Please.
And as an aside, please ditch all the [ [object method] anotherMethod parameter:value] notation. This is damn hard to read folks. Learn this from C# -- keep it readable, use "." notation wherever possible (the Objective C compiler already understands "."s, so why not use them?).
by Fred — Mar 24
The .NET framework is HUGE and despite writing fairly complicated software for a living, I have hardly used 20% of all the classes in it.
Recently I have been tasked to port (scratch that -- completely rewrite) a Windows Mobile application onto the iPhone. Hey what fun -- I didn't even have a Mac. I registered with Apple, downloaded the SDK and then furiously (stubbornly) attempted to install Leopard on a Microsoft Virtual PC. Finally caved in and ordered an iMac.
I got the iMac on Monday, installed the iPhone SDK, compiled a Hello World application in Objective C (which is all new to me!!!) and went home happy.
Yesterday I spent all day watching "Getting Started" videos on Apple's Dev Centre, and reading documentation on-line.
Today I wrote the first page of my mobile application, and it worked! At this rate I will have nailed it down by the end of next week. The original Windows Mobile application took six man months to complete by comparison, and wont be nearly as fast or powerful as the one I am working on now.
Microsoft's Visual Studio may be much more mature (in theory at least it has been around since 1992) than XCode. But they keep rewriting it all from scratch every three years or so, thus it never achieves stability and reliability. Every new version brings a host of irritating unwanted "features" (known as "bugs" to all but those who work for Microsoft).
XCode is refreshingly simple yet very powerful. Such elegance! I think I'm falling in love...
If only I could write all my Desktop applications in XCode (using the Cocoa framework) and just choose to compile for Windows, Mac, or iPhone, then I can die happy in the knowledge that finally humans have evolved real intelligence!
Heck, if only 5% of the computer market belongs to Apple now, there's no reason why they shouldn't aim a little higher. The rest of us will switch quickly if Apple behaved a little less selfishly. In other words, Apple shouldn't use Microsoft as a role model. Just give us developers simpler and more reliable tools, that gives us portability to boot. Please.
And as an aside, please ditch all the [ [object method] anotherMethod parameter:value] notation. This is damn hard to read folks. Learn this from C# -- keep it readable, use "." notation wherever possible (the Objective C compiler already understands "."s, so why not use them?).