Alan Kleymeyer

It took me a while to find this so I’m posting it so I don’t forget.  Before I got my MacBook I was using a Mac Pro workstation with XCode already installed.  It had a control in the toolbar titled "Page" with three options: Project, Build, and Debug.

When I installed XCode on my MacBook I lost the ability to switch between layouts.  One of the things I don’t like working with XCode is how so many windows end up being displayed and the difficulty in finding and switching between them.  The problem is exacerbated by the fact the MIB Editor is a separate program which is not integrated with the XCode environment.  It’s too bad this All-In-One layout isn’t used by default, I may not have had such a bad first impression of the XCode UI.

I finally found how to restore my preferred 3-layout mode.  Simply select All-In-One Layout in the General tab of the XCode Preferences.  BTW, I searched using Google for "Customizing page control in XCode" to find this Apple documentation.  I had found in the View menu "Show Page Control" which gave me a clue but the default page control only gives you Project & Morph.  I though it odd that a control that has it’s own menu item, and that can contain different items, couldn’t be customized on it’s own.

I received a nice reading list recommendation via email in response to this first post on Mac Development.  Here is the recommendation:

Kochan’s, "Objective C" is a great book. On the other hand, Garfinkle and Mahoney is very much out of date to the point that many in the community are upset that O’Reilly still sells the book without a caveat. The Cocoa they were writing about is circa 2000 or 2001. A great deal, mainly from Tiger and even Jaguar, has changed since then.

A better book would be Aaron Hillegass’, "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X", 2nd ed. Aaron’s book is based on his Cocoa Bootcamp, an intense week of A-Z in Cocoa programming. Although a bit long in the tooth, though not as much as G & M, Anguish and Yacktman’s, "Cocoa Programming" is a great tome for filling in
the details that Aaron may gloss over. And no book recommendation would be worth much without mentioning, "Cocoa Recipies for OS X’ by Cheeseman.

Also recommended by a friend: Advanced Mac OSX Programming – by Mark Dalrymple

I'm starting some mac development. I'm reading "Programming in Objective-C" by Stephen Kochan. I also have "Cocoa Applications" by Simson Garfinkel & Michael Mahoney.

One way I justified buying a Mac Mini for Jane was the possibility of being able to do Mac development on it. It comes with all the development tools necessary. So hear I am.

I'll keep a log of my experience as a first time developer on OS X and post the most interesting comments on my blog.

GUI development on the mac vs the PC

Porting to Mac OS X from Windows Win32 API