Flyosity: Mac & iPhone Interface Design Blog by Mike Rundle

It's an interesting experience, diving head-first into the unknown, trying to soak up all the information you possibly can on the way down into the abyss of Mac application development. Everything is new, most of it is documented, and the rest can be learned by reading as much as possible and asking for help when you're lost.

I'm new to Objective-C, new to Cocoa, but have been a hardcore Mac aficionado since 1996 when I got my first Mac — a Performa 6200 — so I have "Apple-ness" running through my veins which is extremely helpful. Creating a beautiful and successful application for the Mac usually means that it looks as if the engineers at Apple could have created something similar, so the expectations are extremely high as far as interface polish is concerned. I'm learning just how much effort goes into a beautiful Cocoa app, and it sure is a lot.

As far as the development process is concerned, it's a big crap shoot. I worked on piecing together the user interface components early in the development process so I could get a better feel for how the app behaves, but making the interface actually function can't happen until X is written, which is dependent upon Y code, which I'm confused about until I do an hour or so of Googling, so it's a chicken and the egg problem. Fortunately, I've been working hard on a lot of the application glue code so that in the next few days I'll be hooking up the interface and giving things some real-world usage.

I've been coding for a long time, but have never really learned C, so initially writing Objective-C was difficult because not only did I have to learn ObjC's syntax, I also had to give myself a crash course on pointers, header files and memory management at the same time. After being absorbed in the Cocoa development world for a few months, I've realized that reading other people's code is the single greatest way for me to get acclimated to "how things are" when developing for the Mac. How to structure your classes, how to load NIBs, the best way to store user data, all these things I learned by pouring over open source Cocoa code I've found online or in Apple's example applications. Seeing how other people have conquered similar problems is probably the best shot in the arm out there.

Finding Other Developers

One thing that has made a huge impact in my ability to learn Cocoa is having a group of people I know can potentially help me if I get too confused along the way. Here's a short list of people who have helped tremendously:

• My buddy Ameir, developer of Guidance
• Matt Patenaude & Laurent Baumann, the developer-designer duo behind Bowtie
• Todd Ditchendorf, developer of Fluid
• Chris Hanson
• Brandon Walkin, UX Designer at Marketcircle
• Ben Barnett, developer of Base
• Andrew Wilkinson, designer of Logbook
• Jonatan Castro Fernández
• Ruben Bakker, developer of Mailplane

So how did I find all these people? Mainly through being a Mac application connoisseur — downloading everything that comes out — and then finding the brilliant people that created them. Twitter has been extremely helpful, in fact I follow every one of those people on Twitter so I can try to absorb their offhand tips and tricks. Emailing people is good too — you'd be surprised how helpful and friendly people are if you just send them a nice email. I've always made an effort to email people out of the blue and commend them on the work they've done, and my Mac development experience has been no different.

So What Am I Working On?

I don't really believe in nebulous descriptions of work-in-progress, written to pique curiosity. I'm working on my first Mac application, an application that I've had in my head (in some form or another) since 2005, and I'm building it mainly to fill my own needs, but I'm hoping that it fills the needs of others, too. Like most Mac applications, you'll be able to download and use it for free, but additional features/functionality will need to be paid for.

I'm working hard on it, and details will surely be coming soon, but for now I think I should shut my mouth and get back to work! Nothing is worse than vaporware.

Categories: Mac OS X