waffle

This post is hard for me to write.

The keenest of eyes may have noticed that the last time I released anything written in Cocoa was in mid-February. I still don’t like to talk about my job any more than is necessary, but this was before my new employment, although not before I’d come in contact with the place of it (I’ve known them for years). It is impossible for me to not make the connection. I’m writing significantly less Cocoa code nowadays, and despite getting a new computer in March, I have yet to transfer all my source code over.

Even though I’ve been writing code in both C# and Objective-C for the past several years, I would be lying if I didn’t say I’ve been writing more C# than ever. I have several reflections around this:

• You can say a lot of things about C#, but writing C# in Visual Studio is a far smoother experience than is writing Objective-C in Xcode. Not only is the built-in Intellisense and refactoring great, there are really great plugins^W”add-ons” that take it to the next level. I know that this is harder to do with a C-derived language than it is with a new language whose supporting infrastructure you just made up yourself, and I know that clang and assorted infrastructure changes will help assuage the tremendous sinking feeling I get sometimes when I wait for the magic to kick in and realize that it’s not there. But it won’t be there tomorrow, and it’s definitely not there now.

• Interface Builder is still far and away better than anything Visual Studio can muster, because there’s a much better culture around user interface design. In Windows Forms certainly, but even in WPF, the level of excellent controls I’m looking for is mostly just not there. Most of them look like crap (and offer a would-be-placating property or two to change the color or font or retarget the Office/Visual Studio/Windows version from which the control’s appearance is supposedly taken as an excuse), and many of them work like crap.

  Maybe the biggest thing to cope with is that if you’re trying to do good interface design on Windows, you have to go the plain-but-default way, look increasingly dated and don’t attempt any moves that Microsoft wouldn’t pull which is a great damper on creative solutions, or you really have to do what feels good for your particular application from the imperfect tools that are there and risk being called out as just another skin app that’s got that “flashy” look (for Windows Classic-theme users) just for the hell of it.

• The thought has occurred that moving to RubyCocoa might be worth it, since Ruby is a language that I really love, header-file-less, a better fit for Cocoa’s loose typing and heavy basic data structure use, and last but not least possible since I intend to make source code available for all my applications eventually. But there’ll be a transition period before I can tease apart Objective-C and Cocoa and adapt fully to all intricacies of writing code for the Ruby bridge (it’s the second part that’s hard). And Xcode’s support for Ruby is far less shining than is the Objective-C support.

• Maybe I’m just spent at the end of each day and especially the weekend where I can really get stuff done regarding my own applications. The drawback, if I may call it that, of a fulfilling and interesting job may be that you’re all out-programmed at the tail end of those 40 hours.

I still love Cocoa. Writing an application in it is more satisfying than any alternative I’ve found. But the actual grunt work is dissuading, and some technologies I really want to use, like Core Animation, manages to combine graphical arithmetics (one of my great flaws since I have trouble context-switching between the two concepts without constantly keeping notes) and writing a lot of code.

I definitely still plan on updating my applications. But right now, I don’t know when that’ll take wings beyond a commitment and an intent. And this saddens me.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.