I’m Drinking The Cocoa Kool-Aid

When Apple bought NeXT and incorporated their NeXTStep framework into the Macintosh operating system, renaming it Cocoa, many people believed that Cocoa was just an alternate manner of developing Macintosh software. The other method, Carbon, was an updating of the existing Macintosh APIs from the previous decades so they’d work well in the Mac OS X Unix-based runtime environment.

Well, at WWDC 2007 when Steve Jobs made it clear that Carbon was not being updated to use the 64-bit computing runtime available when using the PowerPC G5 and Intel chips, the writing was on the wall that Cocoa was now the blessed way to write GUI-based software for the Macintosh. Needless to say, I wasn’t very happy about that, since I had invested zero time learning Cocoa, and my sentiments were shared by many other long-time Macintosh software developers.

Recently, I’ve been reading Aaron Hillegass’s book, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, in order to get myself on board with the new-fangled way of writing Mac software. Okay, I had to use “new-fangled” because I’ve actually been writing Mac software since 1986; if you want to get technical, though, I did write some BASIC programs back in 1984 on one of the original Macintoshes. I guess you could say I’m a real “old-timer.” Along with my readings, I’ve also subscribed to some Cocoa developer e-mail lists.

Today, I posted my first answer. It was a milestone. I’m now drinking the Cocoa Kool-Aid! What was the answer, you say?

[textView setString:@"Lyrics Code Here"];

The question was, How do you replace all the text of a text field to a new set of text?

I’m happy. Now I’m ready to write the next Killer App! Any ideas? Check out the link at the bottom of the page for DesiSoft Systems!