Older blog entries for fjf (starting at number 2)

It's funny. I've been programming Cocoa on and off for two or three years, and quite intensively over the past five months, but never really did anything requiring lots of drawing. I've been putting it off...

Which is odd because normally the first thing I do in a new programming language is draw Mandelbrot figures. Well, I'm writing some software to plot surfaces, so for test cases I've been using data representing areas of the Mandelbrot figure: Fractals are fun!

I must say I am increasingly concerned about the amount of stuff that gets put in the trash can without any thought for the environment. I have decided to write a new "green" trash can application which filters any open source code, data or applications and recycles it by compressing it and making it available to the rest of the open source development world via the web. To prevent the trash can recycling itself, I will of course have to make it a proprietary, closed source application.

On a separate note: I discovered today that Schostakovich's piano concertos make the perfect antidote to an afternoon of Bach's violin partitas.

I don't know. I think Eugenia understands the OSS development process well enough. As she herself says:

I do OSNews for pure fun (it is just a hobby for me in order to fill up my free time), so if you have a problem with my spelling and grammar either:
a) do not come back (spare us and save your time too)
b) send me a proofread version of the article in question.
Whining about something I can't radically improve overnight, is not an option.

Sounds familiar?

Anyway, there's a difference between a small project like AbiWord where it's 20 or so developers trying to satisfy 20000 or so users, and big projects which act like they're the answer to life, the universe and everything. They can't all be 42.

Welcome to the real world.

I have decided that programming is addictive. Or maybe it's just that I'm coding in Cocoa and I'm a chocaholic. Or maybe, as my quiet friend says, I really do need to get laid.

Cocoa. What a strange language! I remember being utterly baffled by it at first, and then at second, also at third... and then one day it started to make sense. Objective-C, the language where everything is expressed between square brackets, like array[indices].

Which you can also have. So:

for (i = 0; i < N; i++) {
  FigureArray * go = [FigureArray arrayWithCapacity:ArrayOfArraySizes[i]];
  [go figure];
}

And of course, with Objective-C++ the square brackets could mean just about anything anyway, e.g.:

class Nuts : public ExerciseInRedundancy
{
public:
  inline id operator[](NSArray * A) {
    if (A)
      if ([A count])
        return [A objectAtIndex:rand([A count])];
    return @"Cashew";
  }
};

(Question: When Apple was thinking of mixing Cocoa with Java, did they plan to call it Cappuccino?)

Insane. I love it. I even looked into using GNUstep. I even compiled an obscure CVS branch of gcc and patched GNUstep source so that I could look into GNUstep using Objective-C++ but

And there is but.

But isn't there always a but?

I'm sorry, but I can't stand GNUstep. From a user perspective: it's too ugly. From a developer perspective: half the methods don't have proper names. I'll take another look next year, but until then it'll just be me and Abi and random Apple users telling me that I've obviously never used a Cocoa application because AbiWord for OS X sucks...

Funny guys. I'll have to send them a bunch of rose stems.

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