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Mac OS X Programming

Started by John, 2007-02-22T22:57:13-06:00 (Thursday)

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John

Does SIUE have a course in learning to program with Carbon or Cocoa (the language for OS X-only applications)? I know there are quite a few Mac users out there, and I myself am crossing over, so I figured there would be at least some interest in it. Are there any professors out there that would teach it? Google has a few openings for Mac programmers, so I figured this might be a good start if anyone else was hoping to head to good ol' Mountain View after graduation. Anyone else?
Thanks,
John

Jesse Cook

Me! Me! Hire Me!  :-o

Seriously, i'd love to work for Google. I actually applied for an internship at Google (Mountain View location) this summer, though I'm not crossing my fingers.

I'm interested in learning about Cocoa and Carbon as well, but I doubt any of the professors are versed in it or willing to teach it.  Dr. Blythe is pretty hard core Linux, but I'm pretty sure he's not interested in OSX.

We could probably do a poll of what CS elective courses we'd like to see and make that an option.
Jesse James Cook
7 Yr Prog, Computer Science
Former VP of CAOS

Nate R

I agree with you guys on wanting a Mac programming presence at SIUE. I've been slowly learning Cocoa on my own for the past year and it's been really fun to work with. Carbon is the old C++ frameworks that were used with OS9 and the transition to OSX, so it really wouldn't be very benefitial to become familiar with that API now since it's almost totally deprecated--as of the 10.5 release slated for sometime this year I'm pretty sure they have 'Cocoafied' everything. Cocoa is where it's at.

Objective-C, the language in which the whole of the Cocoa API is written, is also pretty cool to work with. Anyone who can use C or C++ shouldn't have much trouble picking it up rather quickly. Also the fact that Apple provides a completely free IDE in the form of XCode and Interface Builder makes developing for this platform really great. If you haven't already, the first time you lay out an app in Interface Builder, code it with XCode and get it running is a really satisfying experience.

While it's unfortunate that SIUE doesn't offer any classes about this topic, I can recommend a good book that helped me get started in Cocoa programming.
Cocoa Programming For Mac OSX by Aaron Hillegass