My background is a lot of perl scripting for work, a little bit of VB, and a little bit of hobby java coding. Not having had any academic background in programming is probably my biggest hurdle when it comes to learning Cocoa / ObjC.
One of the earlier posters echo's my major issue, in that there is no real guidance on best practise of how to lay out and structure a larger app in terms of classes, data objects etc.
EG I understand the basics behind OOP, but most of the examples you find on the net are usually related to conceptual ideas (eg a Car has a X doors, a certain size of engine, etc) as opposed to concrete programatic examples of a problem to be solved and the approach someone has taken, and why.
Memory management is certainly another issue, and one that I still havent really gotten my head around properly. And the interaction between IB / Xcode is a little confusing at times, especially when you are trying to figure out how to hook up bindings etc.
And bindings / coredata seem to work well when it does EXACTLY what you want, but when it doesnt, it becomes a bit of a confusing quagmire to figure out how to make it do what you want.
An example of this would be that I have an array of doubles (laptimes) that I want to do an average for. Bindings gives you the ability to do a @array.avg in IB, but I want to round that average to 3 decimal points (to prove milliseconds). Adding a number formatter to the label in IB causes an exception, and I dont seem to be able to make the display format field in IB do anything either.
And finally, yes, the size of the Cocoa frameworks, as well as seeming duplications of behaviour across multiple classes in the framework (eg only very slight differences).
by RobInNZ — Aug 24
One of the earlier posters echo's my major issue, in that there is no real guidance on best practise of how to lay out and structure a larger app in terms of classes, data objects etc.
EG I understand the basics behind OOP, but most of the examples you find on the net are usually related to conceptual ideas (eg a Car has a X doors, a certain size of engine, etc) as opposed to concrete programatic examples of a problem to be solved and the approach someone has taken, and why.
Memory management is certainly another issue, and one that I still havent really gotten my head around properly. And the interaction between IB / Xcode is a little confusing at times, especially when you are trying to figure out how to hook up bindings etc.
And bindings / coredata seem to work well when it does EXACTLY what you want, but when it doesnt, it becomes a bit of a confusing quagmire to figure out how to make it do what you want.
An example of this would be that I have an array of doubles (laptimes) that I want to do an average for. Bindings gives you the ability to do a @array.avg in IB, but I want to round that average to 3 decimal points (to prove milliseconds). Adding a number formatter to the label in IB causes an exception, and I dont seem to be able to make the display format field in IB do anything either.
And finally, yes, the size of the Cocoa frameworks, as well as seeming duplications of behaviour across multiple classes in the framework (eg only very slight differences).