Hello everyone just popping in to say I am still alive. Been pretty busy the last few with prepping for final exams and such. Now that exams are out of the way I can get back to relaxing and working on school work plus learn some more about Objective-C before my next final exam in 8 weeks. One thing about going to school Online with a compressed program structure is you really hammer through content fast in a class. I mean reading 2 - 3 chapters a week, plus discussions and assignments and a quiz here and there. I must say if anything can prepare you for tight deadlines it is a compressed school course. For instance it is now Week 1 of the spring session I read 2 chapters got my 2 discussions to take care of and a 2 page paper that is due at the end of next week + next weeks work on top of that paper. Can get kind of rough and really taxes the organizational skills.

On another note I ended up getting another Cocoa book to get a second perspective on Objective-C + Cocoa and I must say I like this book a lot better then the other one. The other one was good but this one ups it in every way shape and form. This book is what people call the Hillegass book also known as Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X done by the world famous Cocoa teacher. I must say it really shows his explanations and style Put Cocoa and Objective-C Up and Running to shame. My favorite feature of the book is at the end of each chapter the author presents challenges for the reader to go out and write code on your own which is important when learning something new. It is not a book that is all about copy down the example and see what happens he actually gives challenge assignments that make use of the concepts you have learned thus far in the book. Very good stuff. As I move through this book everything is starting to make sense. Cocoa + Objective-C is a whole new perspective on development that goes against the particular trend of modern languages today and right now as things click I can see why so many developers are in love with the system and why Mac OSX applications are so robust and solid compared to the applications on other operating systems. Not to say windows and Linux don't have good software they do but Mac seems to have more of it and part of the reason for that is Cocoa.

I will definitely make sure I keep you updated as things mould together and I really can't wait to start my own first Cocoa Application. I am hoping to actively talk about my project I will be starting as well in this journal. Even tho the application is not a game I still find it important to talk about it because a lot of the issues and concepts I will be dealing with from both a design and programming standpoint are great for everyone to learn from. This is a developer journal after all and I don't see anything stating it has to be game related in nature so all gloves are off and heck it beats having to go out and find another place for a blog and cross link like I tried previously. The new journal system is so much nicer then the old one.