Comments on: Learning OS X Cocoa Programming: MandleTry

By: Vajra

Vajra — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 06:44:35 +0000

Fantastic work! Thanks for the source posting. Helped me out immensely.

By: Murray Todd Williams

Murray Todd Williams — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 18:39:41 +0000

In response to the last three comments (which I neglectfully didn’t see in sitting in my moderated-comments queue until now) I’ve just added a link to a snippet of Objective-C code that handles the Mandelbrot calculations and the Quartz drawing. Look at the very bottom of the article now. (Under “Addendum”)

And to “Cocoa Newbie” sorry, but my brain is spoken for. (And it’s not what it used to be. The odometer is going to flip over any day now.)

By: Mahalis

Mahalis — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 20:18:39 +0000

Any chance you could share your pixel-drawing code? I’m trying to do something pretty similar (another fractal generator, but more generalized) but at the moment I’m stuck at the filling-1px-by-1px-rectangles-very-very-slowly stage.

By: B

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 17:47:51 +0000

Any chance of you releasing the source?

By: cocoa newbie

cocoa newbie — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 04:44:50 +0000

murray…can I borrow your brain?

By: Carole

Carole — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 17:50:29 +0000

One thing about programming on a Mac that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me is the way XCode and Interface Builder are (or aren’t) integrated. When and how to use each app. can be a bit confusing. Thankfully, Aaron Hillegass actually explains this very well (unlike Apple). I really do like that book and very much second the recommendation.

By: Murray Todd Williams

Murray Todd Williams — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 18:17:59 +0000

The Mac programming environment (read: the NeXTSTEP programming environment that is now Mac “Cocoa”) is really as fantastic as I’m always raving. It takes a little figuring-out how to get things working at first, but it is amazingly easy to do vector drawing, 3D OpenGL, scaling and rotating, etc. with Cocoa, and assembling your widgets and getting controls to respond to them is light-years beyond most other development environments. Ie. if you were programming in Visual C++ for Microsoft, I can’t begin to express how complicated it is to actually render a button and have that button-press launch a simple snippet of code.

One of the brilliant things (IMOHO) that Apple did was to include this development environment for free with every computer. Whereas Microsoft charges boatloads of dollars for their tools, Apple followed the Linux model here. Apple also maintains an dizzingly extensive library of “Apple Developers Connection” documents for all these technologies.

In addition to the standard documentation and API references, they also regularly publish articles with (sample code) as supplementary documentation. These articles either give extra help showing a new technology and how it works, or they give extra explanation of some topic when Apple feels the developer base (ie. mortals like me) are having an extra-hard time grasping some particular angle.

All in all, I’m feeling like with Cocoa, the good old days of scrapping-together some neat little program are back. The sad thing is that few people know this.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 16:58:17 +0000

Heh, now I’m remembering the semester in High School I got to spend learning vector based graphics programming on the Evans & Sutherland workstations at CSU. (Although I probably spent more time goofing about with unix and playing netrek.) I remember at one point though I had managed to code a wire frame model of a robot whose arms could be manipulated via potentiometers (paddles.)

Wow, have my programming abilities atrophied since then. Well, I’m glad one of us is still able to program up something neat.

By: Murray Todd Williams

Murray Todd Williams — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 16:03:44 +0000

You’re exactly right, Bryan. I’d forgotten all about that. (But then again, you had those Pete the Fish cartoons! You shall be dubbed the Great Historian!)

Something I loved about Perspex: It was written as a combination of two programs the first would “compile” your CAD image from a series of human-readable commands into a more compact binary file that the second (the actual graphics rendering program) would use. We decided to be funny and actually have the compiler insult the programmer if it found errors.

It must have been immediately following reading Hitchhiker’s Guide or something like that, being inspired by Marvin and the happy Improbability Drive ship’s computer. The more errors you had in your file the nastier the compiler’s temper. If you compiled an error-free file, it’s response was some happy happy joy joy sort of thing.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 22:28:52 +0000

I think for me my days of programming ended when Compute! magazine stopped publishing listings of complete programs you could spend hours typing. I learned more about the secrets of peek and poke from those lengthy examples than anything else.

Oh and hey, what was the name of that CADish program you and Tom worked up? My weak memory says â€œPerspecsâ€ or some such and that it was an acronym for something? Can you remember?