Learn Objective-C on the Mac - Mark Dalrymple [1]
Lead Editors: Clay Andres, Brian MacDonald, Matthew Moodie, Douglas Pundick
Technical Reviewer: Mark Dalrymple
Editorial Board: Clay Andres, Steve Anglin, Mark Beckner, Ewan Buckingham, Gary Cornell, Jonathan Gennick, Jonathan Hassell, Michelle Lowman, Matthew Moodie, Duncan Parkes, Jeffrey Pepper, Frank Pohlmann, Douglas Pundick, Ben Renow-Clarke, Dominic Shakeshaft, Matt Wade, Tom Welsh
Coordinating Editor: Mary Tobin
Copy Editor: Tracy Brown Collins
Compositor: MacPS, LLC
Indexer: John Collin
Artist: April Milne
Cover Designer: Anna Ishchenko
Photo Credit: Weronica Meijer
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Foreword
Beware Dave Mark bearing new ideas.
You’ve probably seen Dave’s name on the cover of the Apress Mac and iPhone books. Actually, his name is on the cover of this book. He’s the Mac and iPhone series editor, he knows how to get stuff done, and I wish I had half of Dave’s energy. And, if you’re a friend of Dave’s, he’ll put you to work. He’s put me to work over the years (in addition to my day job).
“Hey, MarkD, I have this idea for an introductory Objective-C book. Why don’t you and Scott Knaster write it?” Sounds like fun, and it was. I still chuckle at some of jokes that we targeted to very narrow slices of nerdom.
“Hey, MarkD, Jeff LaMarche and I have this idea for an iPhone SDK book, want to be technical reviewer for it?” Sounds like fun, and it was. Then they did another iPhone book, which I got to review. I discovered that this technical reviewing thing is pretty awesome.
Just think of it. You get to read a nerdy book before it comes out. You get to learn cool new stuff along the way. Best of all, you get to poke holes in the text and code, kibitz and generally make random suggestions. And then you don’t actually have to do the work involved in fixing it! And you get paid for it! My spousal overunit lets me keep any money I make off of books, so it’s mine to play with. Daddy’s camera needs a new lens.
Anyway, Dave calls up and says, “Hey MarkD, I have this idea for a Cocoa book, want to be the technical reviewer for it?” Sounds like fun. Daddy needs a new 85mm f/1.8.
So I “meet” this Jack Nutting guy via email. I GoogleStalk for anything interesting. We chat a bit. I start getting chapters to review. They’re interesting. They’re informative. I’m learning stuff. (oh, so that’s how NSPopupMenu bindings work). And they’ve got a fun streak. I very rarely LOL in real life when I’m at the computer, but there was a time or two where I was totally C|N>K. Then I had to explain “C|N>K” to everyone in the publishing pipeline because I wrote it in the reviewer comments.
I had my doubts. Cocoa is a huge topic. The typical Mac OS X desktop application takes a lot more work, and uses a lot more technology and Cocoa classes than the typical iPhone application. Some parts of Cocoa are kind of old and crufty, it being a 20-year-old toolkit. Some parts of Cocoa are totally the new shiny. But no matter what kind of Cocoa app you’re writing, you have to know something about a lot of stuff before you can really get