AlexanderD
I am starting to compile a set of resources for Cocoa Programming on my website. Check it out here: http://www.mekambo.com/developer/
Feel free to register in the forums and post a Cocoa Programming question, answer someone else's question, or give feedback. http://www.mekambo.com/developer/developerforum/
Any advice about things to include on the webpage or in the forums would be greatly appreciated!
Suggestions:
I found cocoadev.com when I was searching for more information on Cocoa Programming. I really like idea of a website where the audience can add pages and text. WikiWiki is such a great concept. There are so many times I see grammatical errors in websites, books, etc., but you can't do anything about it. In a WikiWiki site you can just silently repair, fix, and add. It is great!
I am definitely a newbie. I have read some of the Cocoa books, but still consider myself a beginner. I am at the point where I can make a very simple mandelbrot or "game of life" viewer. I particularly like these kind of recreational computer science projects. If you know of any others please add them below.
Cool recreational computer science projects
- Mandelbrot or Julia Sets
- Sierpinski's Gasket
- Game of Life
- Evolution (from Richard Dawkins' book Blind Watchmaker) - a particularly cool find!
- Fractal Clouds. Lots 'o fun. -- MikeTrent
I get frustrated sometimes with some of the Cocoa books, tutorials, and especially Apple's documentation. It seems like instead of teaching you in simple little bite sized steps, they make it very confusing by adding many different things all at once. If I want to know about how to implement drawers, for example. I have to wade through much superfluous code just to learn that a basic drawer can be done in Interface Builder with 2 or 3 minutes worth of work. You could make a window with a drawer with absolutely no knowledge of object-oriented programming or any programming for that matter. Why read hundreds of pages of documentation, if all you want to do is create a drawer? And there are many simple things like that in Cocoa. Don't get me wrong, this is not to say that reading basic articles on Objective-C is not important or necessary. I believe it is.
Out of this frustration, I started to put together something that would have helped me as I started learning Cocoa. It could be that I also wanted to just put down what I had already learned to get it organized in my head. For whatever reason, I started the page HowToProgramInOSX.
Perhaps it is presumptuous for a newbie to create a page called HowToProgramInOSX. But, considering it is a WikiWiki page, I don't think so. I just organize it, you add the information. Its a place where people can come to add or take the little bite sized pieces of programming knowledge when they need it, as supliment to the current documentation.
So please come by, check it out, add to it, fix it and make it better. I hope it is of use to someone. A big thank you to those who have already added to it!
-- AlexanderD
I totally agree with your philosophy and you may have seen much of that page was created by someone else and that was me.
Thank you whoever you are. --AlexanderD
I agree with you too. I think it is cool that among the newbie apps I've done in Cocoa are a Mandelbrot viewer (with zoom ! ;) and a Game of Life ScreenSaver. Sadly, I do not know many more computer science projects i can propose you, except maybe a simple XOR-encryption tool. That might be too easy though. Evolution sounds interesting, tell me more! -- EnglaBenny
Heh, XOR excription. Coincidentally discussed here: ProtectingResources -- MikeTrent
