April 2011: I have finally identified the main reason for my frustration with the process of learning how to program Cocoa applications: most resources appear to cater to procedural learners. This has left me – a Gestalt learner – frustrated and wondering how *anyone* could learn like this; with hindsight I must admit that there probably *are* people who learn like that, I’m just not one of them. I’ve felt excluded from a community that mostly says ‘this is what you need to learn’ without considering that maybe I need to learn something completely different first, so one of the things I’ll be doing on this blog is to provide a completely different approach.
What you will find here:
- Examination of resources available for Cocoa programmers
- Talk (ok, rantage) about the ‘programming is insanely difficult’ culture
- Discussion of learning styles and how to develop better resources for Gestalt learners
- Adventures in coding where I chronicle my personal journey
- The Virtual Jungle, or rather, -Zoo. Instead of piecemeal applets like Hello World and calculators I plan to be talking about the programming challenges involved in an application of real-world complexity. I’ve settled on programming a virtual zoo because you can show both simple and high-level problems, and since no example exists, I’ll have to _develop_ it. Following examples is very well; but the step from there to creating proper applications is largely uncharted territory.
- A resource Wiki. More often than anything else, I find myself looking for answers to ‘how do I [open a window/add an image from a filepath/use a dropdown menu with Core Data]‘. Some of these answers take days to hunt down… and they shouldn’t. I want to put them in a public place so that the next time I look for something I’ve already worked out, I’ll find it; and I hope it will be useful to others, too.
- Snippet Posts. I am still dithering how to implement this feature. I would prefer to keep them off the front page, and have experimented with custom post features; but right now those don’t work very well (no honouring the ‘more’ tag, title does not get turned into a post link, hence no ability to address a post directly), and I’m thinking of folding them back together after all – I already spent an insane amount of time trying to figure it out, and it’s not really worth the hassle.
Unless things change drastically, this blog will be Objective C only. I’m sure there are weird and wonderful things you can do with Java, or by mixing Objective C and other variants, but life is complicated enough that I don’t want to complicate it further.