Goodbye Windows (and a question about software development)

[CaptSaltyJack]

I will be switching (slowly) to OS X starting in May. Parallels will help wean me off Windows. When Vista was first announced, I was excited about it, but now that it's out and people are *****ing about it and having all sorts of issues, I decided I wanted to jump ship.

I was looking at Ubuntu for a while, it's a really solid OS, and there's tons of support for it, but Linux just isn't 100% there yet. Some things take a LOT of work to get working. Of course, once you get it working, it's solid.

I've decided to get a Mac Pro. I'm excited to make the switch. I do have a question about programming though. I really like Microsoft Visual C# Express, and how it has a very visual interface for designing your application's UI (drag and drop buttons, text boxes, menus, etc), and then coding the logic behind the frontend. Is there a similar thing for OS X? I'd like to continue developing software, but this time for the Mac.

Thanks. Looking forward to going Mac soon!!

 

[MaDDoG]

Welcome aboard matey (said with slight pirate tone)
I have been OSX covert for about 2 months now and will never go back. At first you will find it, difficult because you are used to doing things a ceratin. Then it may seem quirky, but as you begin to understnd it and see why you switched, you will learn to love again.

Can't help you with programming though...I'm sure someone else will soon.

A word of warning.....swearing in any form will not be tolerated on this forum. I received a warning from one of the moderators because I quoted some swearing from a post another member posted about.

Enjoy!!

 

[Amen-Moses]

I've decided to get a Mac Pro. I'm excited to make the switch. I do have a question about programming though. I really like Microsoft Visual C# Express, and how it has a very visual interface for designing your application's UI (drag and drop buttons, text boxes, menus, etc), and then coding the logic behind the frontend. Is there a similar thing for OS X? I'd like to continue developing software, but this time for the Mac.

XCode comes with the OS (you have to separately install it though) and you can register as a developer for free to get access to all the documentation and other tools etc.

Amen-Moses

 

[yogi]

The Mac's development platform is as user-friendly as Macs themselves. XCode is an extremely solid and surprisingly powerful tool, and writing GUI for Mac OS X isn't very hard, once you've got the C++ logical stuff written.

 

[CaptSaltyJack]

Thanks for the replies! Sorry I didn't see them sooner.. I'm not getting email notifications (sporadically), even though I'm set for instant notifications. And I checked my spam folder already, nothing there. Odd..

 

[mac57]

A native GUI environment for the Mac is called Cocoa - I analgize it to GTK for the Mac. It makes GUI programming failry easy, so I am told... haven't tried it myself yet. Read more about it here:

http://osxdaily.com/2007/02/17/learn-cocoa-mac-software-development-for-newbies/

 

[CaptSaltyJack]

Thanks! Bookmarked.

 

[amardilo]

If you are a C# programmer. Have you had a look at Mono? It will let you code in C#.

I too am still looking for an app to replace Visual Studio (I think I am way too use to it). But then again if I don't have Visual Studio it means I can separate my work from my other computing needs .

 

[CaptSaltyJack]

Actually I've been doing some research, seems that Objective-C is the language to learn, and Xcode is the development environment to use. I mean, there are several options, but Xcode is what comes free with OS X, and there are some decent books out there on Xcode and Objective-C.

Time to learn a new language.

 

[MacHeadCase]

You might want to check out O'Reilly's MacDevCenter. It has great articles.

Here's one I just stumbled upon, Graphical Toolkits for OS X: wxPython



Edited to add:

Oops! Forgot to add a link to MacDevCenter.

 

[xstep]

Another site with good tutorials is cocoadevcental.

Realbasic may be an option for you as the environment may be similar to what you know, and it has the ability to compile your code for three platforms.

 

[MacHeadCase]

And how about some Late Night Cocoa?

 

[CaptSaltyJack]

Many thanks for the suggestions!

Python is sweet, but.. I've been spoiled on the Windows platform by having Visual C# Express. Basically I have a window up that is my future application, and I can drag/drop UI elements into it (text boxes, buttons, menus, etc). And if I double click a button I dropped onto my window, it auto generates a function stub where I can start coding the behavior into it.

It seems Xcode offers the closest experience to that? wxPython is sweet and I've been wanting to learn Python, but I REALLY don't want to have to code the user interface manually..ugh.