And the mood went right out the window

Right, after finishing last entry my mood seriously collapsed into oblivion. I needed to do something new, didn't really feel like continuing with one of the other projects. After some digging in the back of my head, I came up with the combination of playing around with a diff-like algorithm (not hard, but had me fascinating for a while now) and some more playing with the cocoa environment for Mac OS X. It won't be the first thing I'll be writing for cocoa so a (yet again) a little flashback.

The first few things I wrote were to play around with carbon and cocoa, carbon in cocoa, wrappers around cocoa, the usual stuff to just get familiar with the inner workings, commonly used functions etc. It sure was interesting for me and kept me busy a few weekends but nothing worth showing off. Naturally, I ended up with the currency converter which I think pretty much everybody builded who wanted to get to know cocoa. Mine looked like this and is completely functional yet useless.

After that I wanted to do something a little bit fancier, so I started figuring out how to do a borderless window in cocoa with carbon embedded in it which in turn contains an opengl window. The idea was to be the biggest showoff possible and give future employers the illusion I was perfectly capable of writing applications for the mac platform. Not that it was true, since I still didn't know a massive amount of classes which make up the cocoa framework, but it sure was fun. I didn't finish it after I got the cocoa part working since I didn't really feel like writing all the custom openGL material I had in mind. Still, it looked cool. Look at my non-squarish border and nifty transparency!

What I want to go now is catch up again with more features and possibilities in cocoa. I want to go and play around with toolbars, list views, loading and saving data, maybe do some stuff with quartz, who knows. I got a fun little project in my head which might help out significantly with developing my other projects and with a bit of luck other mac developers will like it too. We'll see. Right now I just got to go and start reading up on loads of documentation and work my way through a bunch of demonstration applications before I can actually start programming, and that's what I've been doing for the last two days more or less. I haven't written a single line (well, besides a quick look if delta encoding would help in perennial - it didn't) the last two days and it annoys the heck out of me. I guess I just got to read faster! And that's exactly what I'm going to do right now, after that it's time for bed and tomorrow I got to pay a visit to the university again. Stupid social obligations, they keep me up! Ugh! Just let me be and play the wacky professor slash geek! Oh well, goodnight for now and I'll try not to forget to write an update here tomorrow.

[: wacco :]

Leave a comment