Re: Guidance for Cocoa's steep learning curve

FROM : John Terranova
DATE : Fri May 16 07:32:10 2008

On May 15, 2008, at 6:33 PM, Joseph Ayers wrote:

> Imagine growing up on Excel and then dealing with NSTableView.
> How did this Cocoa NSTableView architecture evolve. Where is the 
> history?


When I first started with Cocoa I spent (and I still spend) a lot of 
time in code for NSTableView (and NSOutlineView).  A lot of time 
because of the complexity of the data model -- caching and maintaining 
the caches, spawning threads to render time consuming images, 
notifying the data source object when images are ready to be 
displayed.  You get the idea.  Of course, I started with slow tables 
that did the expensive rendering every time NSTableView asked for the 
data and I built the complexity on top of that.

I started learning how to use NSTableView by reading through 
NSTableView.h in Class Browser in Project Builder (pre-Xcode) and 
reading the NSTableView documentation that Class Browser gave me.  I 
learned that numberOfRowsInTableView: was a pretty important method in 
using NSTableView, so I went to http://developer.apple.com/ and 
searched (search field at top-right of page) for 
numberOfRowsInTableView.  That gave me a wealth of information -- 
documentation and sample programs.  Compiling and stepping through a 
couple sample programs helped me immensely.

There is plenty of documentation and sample programs to help 
developers learn this stuff.  Take the time to find it, read it, 
compile it, step through it, modify it, compile it again, step through 
it again, search the archives (http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/bydate
), read, then, finally, ask specific clarifying questions.

Oh, and my background?  6 years as an Excel programmer at Microsoft. 
It hasn't hindered me at all.  :)

   john