Like a lot of developers nowadays, I’m spending some time learning Objective-C & the Cocoa Framework so that I can jump into iPhone development. I’m clearly a little late to the game, but I usually am, so…no worries.
So far, I’m keeping an open mind (which can be tough for me, as I’m 32 but act like a cranky 72 year old). It’s surprising, Objective-C isn’t as wildly complicated as it first looks, the really disorienting thing is working in Xcode. I’m so in love with the straight simplicity of building apps in Emacs that all the dragging and dropping throws me off. Granted, in my recent (undocumented) foolings with Java, I started to covet all the work that Eclipse was doing for me, however, something about all the magical dragging and clicking makes me nervous. What’s it doing in there?
I’ve also got that old sharecropper feeling, which is kind of rough. Once you develop your fancy iPhone app in Objective-C and Cocoa, you can reuse libraries to build it out as a OSX app, but that’s about it. You can develop a OSX app in Python or Ruby through bridges to Cocoa, but you can’t use that code on the iPhone, iPhone is Objective-C only. You could move some of your heavy lifting to a web service, but then you’re tethering your fancy iPhone app to require a network connection.
Anywho, it’s an interesting thing to learn, I’m sure I’ll have fun with it, it just doesn’t feel like it has the wide open opportunities that learning Python did, or Java does.
