Getting started (again)

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Getting started (again)

Postby udo.killermann » Sun May 06, 2012 4:28 pm

I am still using the previous version of Objective Basic on Snow Leopard and am curious about the current. So I installed Lion last week on a spare disc, downloaded XCode from the App Store. At least I thought so. In order to do this I had to upgrade Lion to the latest patch level. Installed XCode - this time successfully and at last installed the latest incarnation of Objective Basic (OB).

OK - now I am ready for a restart. What has changed, what is new and what has stayed the same, because it was already good?

The IDE looks pretty much the same it did in the previous version. Some menus are longer - especially the "Project" menu has grown substantially. Now you have entries for XCode as interface builder and property list editor as well. This is due to the fact, that Apple has reengineered the development tools from ground up (I'll come to this in a later post). Equally the "Help" menu has several more entries - again this is owed to Apple's tool reengineering.

In the previous Objective Basic you interacted with the IDE and Interface Builder. XCode didn't play a role in the development cycle. The compiler was called from the command line as a background process. And you ended up with a running application if your OB code was right and tight with the interface you designed and wired.

This time you need the integration with XCode, because there is only this tool and nothing else. Apple has unified the IDE similar to what Microsoft did years ago with Visual Studio. All other things are behind the scene and the programmer doesn't have to jump around. This is a little different if you are coding with OB - the IDE isn't part of XCode but tightly integrated.

All coding is done with the IDE. If you have to design the user interface and wire it up, you'll have to use XCode.

So to get a start with OB and programming for OSX, you'll have to master four different aspects:
  • Objective Basic as a programming language
  • Objective Basic IDE
  • XCode as Interface Builder
  • Cocoa as the underlying programming framework

A fifth aspect comes along the way: Object orientation is needed to understand the relations between the different classes available in Objective Basic. You'll need this knowledge even if you don't want to create your own classes. I'll try to cover these different aspects in postings during the next weeks.
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MacBook (2GHz, 4 GByte) - Lion (10.7.3)
started Objective Basic coding in April 2010 - still enjoy it ;-)
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Re: Getting started (again)

Postby berndnoetscher » Mon May 07, 2012 9:49 am

Nice introduction, thanks Udo :-)
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