reesesWeb

So, for the first time in eight years now, I have written a NeXTSTEP^WCocoa app in Objective C. I had forgotten how easy it is to do decently cool stuff.

In my conversion to the Mac, I noticed a few things that were lacking from the whole experience. Since I claim to be able to code, I built a list, and started working from easiest to hardest. I'm done with the functionality for the first item, and now I have to move on to the most important part of any Macintosh app -- the icon.

One thing that's cool about the Mac community is that there are scores of tiny companies with a few shareware apps that would be free in any other environment. But in the Mac environment, there are lots of $5-10 applications that actually look quite slick. Because Cocoa makes it so easy to build small utilities, that price range is actually fair and reasonable.

So, I'm thinking about trying the water with this, and releasing it as a $5 app. That would involve more testing, better coding, actually writing unit tests, documentation, an installer, and the aforementioned icon. Not to mention any sort of nagware or shareware leveragability, which I don't think would be worth it, frankly.

Ever since switching from NS & OS as my primary development platform back in '95 or '96, I've been nostalgic about Project Builder and Interface Builder. "Back in the day, the NeXT programming environment was better than anything we use now!"

Ouch, I hate having my fond memories of youth shattered. The GUI builder is sweet, of course. It's so easy to build menus, write code to manipulate the GUI elements you drew, etc. But the code editor is the raw sux0r. There's no code completion, it's not simple to navigate to API documentation, it's a pain to jump around in the code, there is no inline error reporting (underlining errors as you type them, for example), no code folding, no live templates, the class browser is primitive, etc. IDEA spanks its hairy little butt.

I really like Objective C, and I really like Cocoa. I hope that Xcode, which will ship with my already-ordered Panther upgrade (which I got for the $20 price, despite ordering my 15.2" G4 PowerBook too early to hit the official qualification date) and will hopefully solve all my problems.

One more PB complaint: The battery life is so substandard as to be insulting. I'd consider taking it back if I didn't love so many other things about it. The battery in this thing is actually much smaller than the previous revision of this same laptop, by about 30% smaller. I think I got about 2.5-3 hours with aggressive power saving (low backlight, etc.) which just isn't acceptable, since I forwent a T40p with a 7-hour battery for this beast.

Has anyone used one of those battery plates that sits under your laptop and feeds the DC-in port? How well do they work, how heavy are they, and would you buy one again? I'd like to be able to at least _watch_ an mpg movie on a flight and not have to shut down the computer halfway through.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

delicious | digg | reddit | technorati