MC Squared - Mac Developers

“Blog It.” The last words from the fingers of Mark tonight. He was, of course, talking about the latest additions to the already impressive arsenal of hardware products stamped with ‘The Apple’.

iPod shuffle. The (by some) long awaited flash based MP3 player from Apple. The final move in their domination of the MP3 player market. All other players were blown out of the water when the iPod was introduced, but, until now, the fancy of buyers looking for a more modest, less expensive product has not been tickled by Apple. Anyone now looking for an MP3 player come storage unit has to give at least one member of the iPod family a glance. Just about everyones needs are now catered for by Apple, the iPod range now extends from the 512MB iPod shuffle right the way up to the 80GB iPod photo.

Measuring in at 8.4cm long, 2.5cm wide and 0.84cm thick, without a ruler, I’m pretty sure that makes the iPod shuffle about the size of two of my fingers put together and it probably weighs less that my fingers too, at 22grams. I can see this being another top seller for Apple. Even current iPod owners will be buying them. It’s a lighter companion for that 30minute jog in the morning.

Now onto the beast. The Mac mini. Wow is the word ladies and gentlemen, wow. Rumours were in flight about this product around a week before the keynote speech. There was even a rather shoddy lot of fake pictures produced. However fake these pictures were, they weren’t that far away from the end product. The end product that is the 16.5cm wide and 5cm tall G4 machine that will change the world of Apple as we know it. I reckon this is going to be Apple’s product of the year in 2005, like iPod was in 2004. The Mac mini starts at a fantastic £340, an ideal price for those PC users who have always wanted to dip their toes in the Apple world, but were afraid to spend close to £1000 in doing so. This is definitely a step in the right direction for Apple. Just as people are losing more and more faith in Microsoft based systems, what with spyware and security holes all over the place, a new, inexpensive aleternative has been unveiled. I read that iPod users are now switching from PCs to macs, with the Mac mini even more people will be switching as the price is now no longer an excuse.

PDF’d the first 9 MDC tutorials for easier reading alongside Xcode.

1. Digging Deeper into Mac OS X
2. Componenets of Object-Oriented Programming
3. The Objective C Language
4. Build your first Cocoa App
5. Giving the simple text editor ‘legs’
6. Creating a color meter using Cocoa
7. Strings in Cocoa - Part 1
8. Strings in Cocoa - Part 2
9. Memory Management in Objective C

Hopefully that will be the last bit of (though useful) procrastination this morning. Otherwise I risk turning into this guy.

Whilst Mike perused his slumber this morning, I took the time to modify my development rig a little. Here’s the current work in progress.

Update: Mike later sent me his;

Mike was late for work today, still no news yet. MSN says he’s sleeping..

So, we know we want to write software for Mac. Where to start.. Well Cocoa seems better than Carbon, Carbon appears to be a gentler learning curve for people who want to stick with procedural languages or easily port code from systems using these languages. Cocoa described as a much faster language for developing than Carbon;

Using Cocoa, developers can create full-featured applications in a fraction of the time they would need for procedural languages

Mike spotted these O’Reilly tutorials which we plan to work through and try and develop applications straight from that - we’ll reassess whether we need to buy any books etc once we’ve worked through those tutorials and written some applications.

We’ll both post any applications we make on this blog.