A number of software development courses, such as Codecademy or even traditional university classes, prepares the student to solve problems using their language of choice, but leaves them unprepared to go to the next step. This next step is to take what you have created and fold it into something free-standing and usable; Something you can share with friends; Something attractively packaged.
My own dilemma is that I have been taking classes and practicing programming C++ on my mac using XCode as my IDE. Now that I have actually created something (a personal summertime project between classes), I want a good way to present my work. Something more attractive and user friendly than the Terminal environment I currently have.
According to apple, my next step is Cocoa. But, what is Cocoa?
Apple defines Cocoa as “Cocoa is an application environment for both the OS X operating system and iOS, the operating system used on Multi-Touch devices such as iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.” Which could be meaningful… but not very descriptive to me.
Hot Cocoa
For anyone familiar with Apple lore, Cocoa was first introduced as NeXTSTEP in 1989: A product of Steve Jobs’ successor company NexT. “You can use several programming languages when developing Cocoa software, but the essential, required language is Objective-C … You can even mix C++ code with your Cocoa code and link the compiled code into the same executable.” It is this last phrase that gives me hope that I can figure out how to possibly use the work I have don’t so far and weave it (somehow) together with cocoa to add a friendlier appearance to my work. Furthermore, it looks like I could also use Ruby or Python with Cocoa, two languages that I have been working with and find to be somewhat less awkward at times than C++.
So, how to actually put this together: C++ and Cocoa?
…
-I’ve been sifting through resources for a couple days now trying to identify some starting point to this without much luck.
-Perhaps this is the wrong way to go about using my C++ code, but is there another way?
DownHouseSoftware 