Bob McCune

I just wanted to send out a reminder that the first CocoaHeads of Minnesota meeting will be this Thursday (6/12) at 6pm. It’s at the offices of Synergy Information Services in Bloomington. For more information and directions check out the CocoaHeads page at their site.

At the first meeting I’ll be giving a presentation entitled “Getting Started with Cocoa” where I’ll give a high-level overview of the tools and basic techniques you’ll need to know when writing Cocoa applications. It looks like I may also be giving a presentation on Objective-C 2.0 at the July meeting. I’ve had a number of people express interest in giving future presentations, but have yet to pin down specific dates. Please let me know if you’d like to give a talk or product/project demo and I’ll get you added to the calendar.

I’m really looking forward to meeting all of you on Thursday!

-Bob

Over the weekend, I finished reading the 3rd edition of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass. The previous edition had long been considered the best introduction to the topic, but it had grown rather out of date given the major changes introduced in the Leopard release of OS X. Thankfully, the 3rd edition has been completely revised to reflect the current state of Mac OS X development.

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X is an introductory guide to programming on the Mac platform. It provides broad coverage of the core Mac programming concepts you’ll need to write real world applications, but is not intended to be a definitive reference on the subject. Aaron’s presentation of the material is excellent and the code examples really help explain the concepts being covered.

The organization of the book has changed considerably since the last release. Several less-relevant and irrelevant chapters have been dropped and replaced with chapters covering Core Data, Core Animation, web services, and garbage collection. Additionally, the existing content and examples have been significantly revised giving this release the feel of a whole new book.

I would highly recommend this title to anyone interested in Mac development. Even if you own the previous edition, I think you’ll find the new and revised content well worth the price.

I’d like to officially announce that CocoaHeads of Minnesota is on! My friends at Synergy Information Services have graciously offered to host the meetings at their offices in Bloomington, MN. Our regular meeting schedule will be the second Thursday of the month at 6:00pm. We’ll be kicking things off on June 12th at 6:00pm!

As it’s likely many attendees will be new to Cocoa development, I will be giving a presentation entitled “Getting Started with Cocoa” which will provide an overview of the frameworks, tools, and techniques you’ll need to get started writing Cocoa applications. Beyond the presentation I’m looking forward to meeting everyone and getting your feedback on where we’d like to go as a group.

The official notice will be available on the main CocoaHeads site shortly and we’ll have our local website up and running this week. CocoaHeadsMN.org will be your primary destination if you’re a CocoaHeads of Minnesota member.

Watch this site for more updates this week!

-Bob

I wanted to send out an update regarding CocoaHeads. I got the official green light this week from Mark Dalrymple, the founder of CocoaHeads, to move forward with starting a new chapter in the Twin Cities! I’ve just started looking for a place to meet so if you know of available office space, private meeting room, or a vacant tool shed in your backyard, please let me know.

I’ve also started reaching out to potential presenters/speakers. I’d like to use the first few meetings to cover some introductory material in order to set the stage for some more specific topics down the road. To that end, I’ll likely start things off by giving a “Getting Started with Cocoa” talk. It sounds like we may have someone interested in giving an introduction to iPhone development as well. Some additional useful intro material would be topics such as Objective-C 2.0, the Foundation APIs, Cocoa Bindings, Development Tools, etc. If you’d like to give a talk on any of these subjects or have other content ideas, please contact me.

We will have an official home on the CocoaHeads site in the near future. Until then, I’ll continue to post updates on this blog.

I am considering starting a CocoaHeads chapter in the Twin Cities. What is CocoaHeads you ask? I’ll use the home office’s definition:

CocoaHeads is a group devoted to discussion of Apple Computer’s Cocoa Framework for programming on MacOS X. During monthly meetings, members present on their projects and offer tutorials on various programming topics.

I think this might be a fun way to meet and learn from others who have an interest Mac development. Presentation topics could be anything from How do I get started? to Creating Dynamic UIs with Core Animation to Demo: My iPhone App That Will Rule The World. I don’t think anything would be off limits as long as it pertains to Cocoa.

As step one I’ve set up a simple online poll to gauge potential interest. I’ll let this go for a couple of weeks, so please vote if you’re interested and let’s see what happens.

[poll=2]

If you’re a new XCode user you’ve probably noticed the default header comments in your .h and .m files reference this phantom entity called, __MyCompanyName__. As you most likely don’t work for __MyCompanyName__, let’s change it to something more appropriate.

This value is stored in the PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions dictionary in the com.apple.Xcode domain. You could edit the .plist file directly, but it’s usually easier just to do this through the Terminal.

Begin by opening a new Terminal window. If you want to query for the current value you can enter in the following command at the prompt:

defaults read com.apple.XCode PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions

Your output should look something like:

{
ORGANIZATIONNAME = "__MyCompanyName__";
}

Let’s set this to some more fitting by entering the following at the terminal prompt (all one line):

defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions -dict ORGANIZATIONNAME "Your_Name_Here“

For a quick sanity check you may want to execute the defaults read command again just to verify that the value was set. You’ll likely need to restart XCode before these changes get picked up in the IDE.

Now, get back to coding!

You may have heard Apple has released a firmware update for the Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS). This is a major update if you own an AEBS as it finally delivers the ability to wirelessly backup your Mac systems via Time Machine. Although Apple hasn’t yet publicly made that pronouncement, I can confirm that is does, in fact, work.

One little glitch I initially ran into is it wouldn’t identify my wireless backup drive in the Time Machine interface even though I could connect to it through the Finder. The fix? I just plugged the drive straight into my MBP and started a Time Machine backup. I killed the job and plugged the drive back into my AEBS and now everything works just fine. It must have needed to write a signature of some kind identifying it as a valid back up device.

The initial backup, depending on the size of your drive, will likely take several hours to complete over WIFI, but the incremental backups only take a few seconds and are largely transparent to the user. Very cool!

-Bob

Over the past few months I’ve been spending a lot my free time learning Objective-C and Cocoa. Although it’s been fun learning a new language and framework, it has been somewhat of an uphill climb. Objective-C was the easy part. If you have some familiarity with C and also some experience with an OO language like Java, C#, or C++, you’ll pick it up within a week or two. Cocoa, on the other hand, can take quite a bit more time to wrap your head around. It’s a very large and robust framework and understanding how to use its constituent parts to form a whole requires a fairly significant investment of time and effort.

One of the biggest challenges to learning Cocoa is the lack of up-to-date books. There are several on the market, but most are woefully outdated. The language, development tools, and available frameworks and APIs have changed considerably since these books were written which can present an obstacle to learning from these older references. Thankfully, there are some new and updated titles coming out this year from Aaron Hillegass, Bill Dudney, and Erik Buck. I’ve got ‘em all on pre-order!

Although the book market may be a bit lacking at the moment that doesn’t mean there aren’t useful resources to be found. In fact, you’ll find quite the opposite is true. Apple’s Developer Connection posts many references, guides, and sample code at its site. There are also a number of useful third-party resources I visit regularly including MacDevNet, CocoaDev, CocoaBuilder, and Scott Stevenson’s excellent Cocoa Dev Central. Additionally, you’ll find dozens of great blogs and articles in various places. One of my new favorite Mac dev blogs is Marcus S. Zarra’s and Matt Long’s Cocoa Is My Girlfriend. The content is great and the name is brilliant!

The problem isn’t that there’s not enough information to be found. The problem is how do you make sense of it all and more importantly, how do you use this information to build a real application?

To help in this regard I’m starting a new site called Operation: Cocoa. Its purpose will be to provide the aspiring Cocoa developer with a path through the maze. Although it will likely be a few months before the site is up and running, I’m already working on content and will be hosting it on this site in the interim. The first tutorial entitled “Hello Cocoa” will be posted in the next week or two.

I’m very interested to hear any comments or opinions you have about this idea: what you think about the site name, what kind of content would you like to see, etc.

Thanks,

  -Bob

Today Apple released version 10.5.2 of Leopard. I normally wouldn’t get too excited about an OS point release, but 10.5.2 is definitely an exception. The reason being is Apple has fixed the two most widely panned changes in Leopard: the translucent menu bar and Stacks.

The translucent menu bar has to be the most criticized UI change in Leopard. This was an odd, Vista-like change that never made any sense. At best it was annoying and at worst it screwed up the antialiasing and made the menu bar illegible. Thankfully, the option to turn off this craptastic feature has been added in the latest release. Under System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver there is a new checkbox to turn off the translucency. Now you can go from:

back to the more sane:

The other heavily criticized feature is Stacks. A stack provides a new way of viewing the contents of a Dock folder. For instance, clicking on the “Downloads” stack in the Dock produces a view like the following.

Although I think this is an interesting idea, the initial implementation was somewhat half-baked and actually took away functionality found in previous releases.

The two main problems were that you were limited to either a fan view, like above, or a grid view. Neither one of these views worked well with folders containing a large number of items. The other problem was it was impossible to tell the difference between the various stacks in your Dock as you had no control over their icons. Each was simply displayed as a “stack” of the folder content’s icons.

I’m glad to say this too has been addressed in the latest release. You now have much more control over the behavior of this feature. Right-clicking or Control-clicking on the stack displays a menu allowing you to select between grid, fan, and list views. Additionally you can also choose between displaying the folder as a Stack or a standard folder. These changes effectively give you back the behavior you had in earlier versions of OS X.

The 10.5.2 update introduces a whole host of fixes and features beyond the ones I’ve mentioned, but these two alone are reason enough to upgrade.

Go Tasty Burrito!

For several months now, all of the candidates have been hounding me to make a public endorsement of their candidacy. Everyone from Obama to Hillary to McCain to Romney have been looking for me to give them the final push over the top as we head into Super Tuesday. I have decided I cannot, in good conscience, stand behind any one of them.

Instead, I have agreed to officially endorse the one true candidate of change. And yes, that candidate could be none other than A Tasty Burrito.

Tasty Burrito is the true candidate of change. He promises to end the hamburger-centric policies that have plagued this country for far too long. His economic stimulus plan guarantees all middle and lower income families will receive sour cream and guacamole rebates and a government-provided “stay fresh” container for all ground corn-based products.

Now some will tell you his rhetoric is long-winded and gassy. That you’ll feel bloated by his speeches. I wholeheartedly disagree. I find his platform to be both delicious and quite satisfying.

But you say, “Bob, can we in this perilous time of war and terrorism, a rapidly declining dollar, and record foreclosures really trust the presidency to burrito stuffed in an Armani suit?” My response? Sí, se puede, yes we can!