Comments on: Cocoa Development Tools

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By: Romain Guy

Romain Guy — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 00:13:56 +0000

Scott: Hey, thanks for replying. I love your blog :) I’m glad to hear good things about Xcode 3, and I am indeed waiting for Leopard/Objective-C 2.0 before writing a real app in Cocoa. I want garbage collection.

To get back to the actions topic, I know it’s all I need to type, and I don’t really mind typing it (I’ve spend 7 years typing all my UIs by hand in Swing after all.) I just found it weird that the tool is not able to give me the same experience all the way through the development.

And I still hate .h files.

By: Scott Stevenson

Scott Stevenson — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 22:30:51 +0000

Refactoring is coming in Xcode 3, which is part of Leopard. Interface Builder (which is getting a major update) also supports refactoring. Objective-C 2.0 has garbage collection.

As for adding actions, all you have to do is type this:
-(IBAction)myAction:sender;

It takes five seconds. :) You’d still have to type the actual action name into a text box in Interface Builder anyway, so the difference is pretty minor. You could also just use TextMate and add a tab trigger for it.

By: Antonio

Antonio — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 17:08:51 +0000

I agree with Romain that in terms of conventional IDE features, XCode is a bit behind others development tools. It reminds me that the official Apple Development tool in the early days was the MPW (Macintosh Programmer Workshop), which was essentially a command line based Development Tool, and you wondered why Apple didn’t give a fancy GUI to their own tool. However, as soon as you started mastering programming the Mac, you forgot of any shortcoming of the MPW, as you realized that the Macintosh Toolbox and the MacApp Application Framework blew away by far any other development tool that existed at that time on any platform. The same thing happens today: XCode is not the smartest IDE, but Cocoa is lightyears ahead of anything else in terms od Desktop Application development.

By: Envious Swing Dev

Envious Swing Dev — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 18:44:55 +0000

I have also been playing around with Cocoa desktop development the last few months and as a long time Swing developer; I must say I am very envious of the Cocoa tools and frameworks. There are some oddities as Romain highlighted, especially no garbage collection, but all in all it leaves Swing in the dust. The Bindings, Core Data, Core Image, and Core Animation(leopard) stuff built right into XCode and IB are a great productivity boost. Not to mention a robust Document/Application framework. Don’t get me wrong, I love working with Swing especially the power it gives you but I am tired of the long term deficiencies:
1. Ugly cross platform look and feel.
2. Missing modern components.
3. No Document/Application framework (I know its coming)
4. Netbeans GUI builder not all the way there but I like it.

It all is similar to the superiority of WebObjects to EJB in regards to server side development.

Just my opinion

By: Romain Guy

Romain Guy — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 18:44:49 +0000

leopard: The problem is I don’t work at Sun anymore and I’m just a (poor) student :)

Scott: At least they have a bunch of stuff that make me forget those small inconveniences. I can’t wait for Leopard and Core Animation and Objective-C 2.0 and… :)

By: Scott

Scott — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:04:44 +0000

hehe, I’m too slow on the “Submit Comment” button. Anyway, I see your point. I do a lot of development in Visual Studio and as fas as an integrated development environment goes, XCode + IB has a ways to go (except as you noted when it comes to the visual design of the UI). The debugger leaves a lot to be desired when compared to the VS debugger.

By: Scott

Scott — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:01:57 +0000

Interesting perspective. When I write a Cocoa application, I usually start in XCode. Design my controllers and models, with the needed connectors and event handlers. Then I design the UI in Interface Builder, wiring up the events when needed. So I’ve never generated the headers and code files from IB. I always make my changes in Xcode, then tell IB to re-read the header file and re-instantiate the object.