The situation didn’t quite happen as I carefully planned out with my new Mac.  But life is chaos and random.  I was waiting for the June refresh.  The big downside was that the nVidia 320M graphics chip would all but assuredly be downgraded to the Intel HD 3000, an integrated bugaboo that was according to research and anecdotes, a huge step down.  With the Air already being lacking in graphics horsepower (yet just enough for my Telltale gaming needs) it was definitely a hard thing to consider.  But the potential pros had me convinced.  Sandy Bridge processors meant more oomph in CPU intensive tasks of which I do admittedly few, more power per watt meant better battery life, Thunderbolt could be beyond amazing through storage and external graphics cards, and ideally the cost of upgrading to a 256GB SSD would fall to something affordable and might be an option on the 11”.

My wife’s aunt works for a company that has a reseller agreement with Apple and she gets a nice discount on certain Mac models.  I asked the missus to inquire about it so I’d have another avenue to save some bucks when the time came (still thinking this would be June or later).  She got back to us with prices on the Airs and it turns out the 13” ultimate (2.13GHz Core2Duo, 4GB memory, 256GB SSD) was available for a super low price of $1388 when the other configurations were only a measly $100 off or so.  That’s about $400 in savings right there.  It would be a “demo” unit and they are only allotted a certain quantity per quarter at that price.  So when June comes around that offer might not be available.

I had to do some deep soul and logic searching.  I don’t do anything processor intensive beyond the occasional Handbrake re-encode.  Graphics are about to get a lot worse and who knows how Telltale games will perform.  Prices on SSDs didn’t drop with the Macbook Pro line refresh and today, the iMac refresh told the same story.

I decided to bite.  The unit was ordered last Wednesday and shipped today.  According to FedEx it’ll be in town on Friday.  I’ve been spending a decent amount of time in Daydream Land since then.  It’s like waiting for Christmas and I’m good at distracting myself while time passes.  At worst, I’ll sell my unit next year and get an Ivy Bridge, when Thunderbolt will be more mainstream and the Intel graphics should get a significant boost.  It should do me good until then.

Of course I had to revisit my dream list of accessories I wanted to buy to beef up the Air experience.  I got a STM Small Alley shoulder bag which appears really cool, has enough pockets for things of all sizes and yet is small enough to not be cumbersome when moving around.  I also wanted a sleeve to go inside the bag to provide more padding.  The one I got, a Case Logic PLS-13 neoprene, turned out to be too wide even though it was designed for 13 inchers which is a real shame because it’s very well made.  I hadn’t planned for it but while surfing around I decided I wanted a wireless desktop.  I grabbed an Apple Wireless Keyboard (no number pad breaks my heart but worth the tradeoff) and a Logitech M305 Wireless Mouse.  Both are small enough to stow in my shoulder bag should I want to for whatever reason.  There’s a Samsung portable DVD drive on the way so I can install Windows 7.  And besides that I can wait longer to get a USB Ethernet adapter, AppleCare, an extra power adapter to keep in the bag, and maybe a BookArc to save desk space.

The waiting continues.  It only just shipped today from China and the way time is displayed on the FedEx website is a little screwy even with the supposed options of local, origin, and destination time.  Last I checked it 10PM in the evening on May 3rd hadn’t happened yet as of this writing.  I did something a little geeky to determine when it might come to me as Friday by 4:30PM seems a little… long and I don’t quite remember having Apple shipments take so long (granted, the last Mac I bought from the online store was a first-gen Intel Mac Mini… the rest being OS updates day-of-release delivery).  Putting my tracking results side by side with others some have posted in a certain Mac Rumors thread, it should be here Thursday if it stays on the same track theirs did.  The nights fly by quickly with the baby and all but the days are spent in a sweaty haze.

Christmas can’t come soon enough.

As a side note, it feels great to be making progress through a book whether I’m reading every single word or not.  One of my bad character traits is I’ve bought lots of programming books over the years and the number that I’ve actually gone cover to cover on is less than a handful (required texts for classes only, really).  I bought them with the full intention of learning whatever the subject matter was (Java, Perl, Apache, PHP, Oracle, etc) and rarely got past the preface sections.  That’s a lot of lost money and space on my bookshelf.  I think I can stick with it and move on to higher concepts, namely Cocoa.

Objective-C is tough to handle at first.  It’s kind of like knowing Latin and moving on to Italian.  The basic stuff is the same, especially the C, but there’s a lot of syntax that’s thrown in that doesn’t jive with typical C style.  Being an object-oriented language, it’s structured around objects, or classes.  A class definition is broken up into two parts: interface (template) and implementation (methods/functions spelled out).  The main program calls it through messages which use syntax enclosed in stiff brackets.  Hello, Smalltalk legacy.  Main program code is stored inside .m files.  Inside the class definition, the interface section of which is typically stored in a .h file, there are @ symbols and pluses and minuses abound.  Kochan suggests placing the implementation portion in a separate .m file.  This complicates the “simple” command line words to compile the program and it’s because I’m moving from a simple program to a full blown project, which is what most will eventually become.

Did that sound like a lot of information to process?  It sure was and is.  I can hardly consider myself solid on it but luckily I’m a quick learner and I randomly think about it and try to remember the concepts when I’m not looking directly at them.  It’s also very much a learning-by-doing thing.

I bristled when pointers were introduced right off the bat.  Not introduced with an explanation, but shown in syntax with an explanation promised later.  Luckily I’ve had a little bit of experience with them and generally know how they work in concept.  Whenever I’ve used them in code however, I can expect dozens of errors by expecting them to do something they aren’t really doing in practice.

Strange as it is to get my head around these different ways of actualizing concepts I’ve done countless times before, I am enjoying myself.  Moving along.

Going back to the stay-at-home moms, who admittedly I only see directly through Facebook, it seems like their lives have no room for anything else besides doing things and events with the kids every day alongside fellow moms.  Nothing about hobbies, pop culture, or whatever.  I’m not going to have the chance to spend every hour with my kid which stinks but if I did I would make it a point not to end up that way.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about what kind of life I want to live from day to day.  This was probably spurred by our move to a new apartment back in November which in many ways is a step down.  We’re on the second floor and the floorboards creak so badly with almost every step it’s like living in a preserved colonial mansion.  It also seems small.  Square footage is more and we got an extra bedroom in the deal but they are all centrally planned out so you don’t have to walk much to get from the farthest end to the other.  It feels cramped.  Parking is horrible.  Typically it’s a minimum of a hundred feet or more from the car to the apartment.  At nighttime when everybody is home from work, forget about it, it’s practically a couple blocks away.  So besides seeing my wife and all my prized possessions, I hate going home.  But I’m not a social butterfly either so it’s not like I’d rather be out hanging with people.

To get around that, a number of things are going to come together according to my plans.  It’s not worth moving again for the third time in three years.  Until we save up for a house, I have to modify the status quo a bit to keep my sanity.  To improve my alertness and general comfort level, I’m going to run on the treadmills available in the apartment complex’s workout room.  Free (subsidized by monthly rent of course), within walking distance, not only open during banker’s hours, and simple.  If I’m in shape, I reckon, I’ll feel better overall and will be able to maintain a decent sleep schedule after the newborn phase is over.  The second place is also free and convenient.  There is a library across the street from my place and I am going to take a laptop over there and perhaps a coffee-flavored beverage for a few hours of peace and quiet away from home.  That will probably happen only on the weekend which is fine because I don’t have to worry about work the next day.  I’ll pack my Nook in the laptop bag and check out some free e-books the library provides.  I’m pretty much anti-paper at this point.  Too big and too weighty.

That’s a big place where the Macbook Air is going to be a necessity.  I’m going to have a bag full of accessories on top of the Air and I don’t want the shoulder getting sore or the fans revving up for no reason.  Stow and go.  The app I have in mind to develop is going to depend on that quick boot SSD capability for both use and development.  Library, work, wherever, I won’t feel bogged down.  I’m going fully mobile.

All of the free things are pretty important.  The two of us have a set amount per month we can use for anything we want but if the baby costs more than we planned, we might have to drop that amount.  As I’m technologically-inclined with Macs and videogames, my share doesn’t go very far.  I do plan to quit smoking before the kid gets here and that will help a lot.

Where does my kid fit into this whole rambling?  At least one of us will be devoted to her every single hour we’re not working.  That lets her get the love and attention she needs and lets the parents go do things by ourselves.  The wife was a big workout nut before she got pregnant and having to sit around all the time has her feeling pretty antsy among other things.  She’s said she’s going to go back to exercising a lot and I believe her and support her doing that.

We don’t have to be parents or normal people.  We can be both.  When you become a parent, you don’t suddenly stop living.  You just make priorities.  Of course this is all easy to say right now before I actually have to go through with it.  But I’m optimistic.

From there I’ll graduate to the Apple Developer Library.  It’s a free resource online for people that sign up (also for free) for an Apple Developer account.  It’s pretty darn fleshed out and articles are well written, but they’re at a slightly higher comprehension level than I can use right now.  I’ve been exposed to nearly all general programming concepts but I’ve mastered very few.  Pointers still give me a ton of trouble, as an example.

I mentioned in passing in a previous post that I had written my first Objective-C application.  This was done via a tutorial in the ADC but I was basically just following directions without a whole lot of understanding what I was doing and why.  That was on the Mac.  It was a simple form-based exercise.  Without access to that here at work, I dove in to my textbook and wrote a real command line program using a typical template for what I’ll be doing in the future.

I tried to compile it.  Uh oh, errors.  I know the C compiler works because I’d tried it before.  But it didn’t like O-C that much.  Using some Google-fu, it appeared that it wasn’t working because it wasn’t talking to the O-C header files in my includes, namely Object.h.  I had to change the boilerplate source to the literal path of the .h file and it… worked.  Kinda.  The two started talking but I am still having problems getting to the finish line.  The debug text isn’t helpful, not pointing me to any specific line it’s choking on.

After hours of frustration and searching, my only option appeared to be to do a makefile.  My loathing for those things is nearly unmatched and I was close to canning the hope of ever really doing Objective-C on Windows for good.  Then I hit the site of Stephen Kochan, the author of the book, wondering if there was some errata/more information than was in the book about doing it (his suggestion there was to go the GNUstep/MinGW route).  On one of the forum topics a guy was having the same issue I was for all intents and purposes.  Another guy chimed in with a very verbose command line action to do to get it to compile.  It worked!  Roadblock successfully destroyed.

Check out this link for the full thread.  The price of the book was worth it to me for this one problem solution alone.

The command to use is:

gcc `gnustep-config –objc-flags` -o sample sample.m -L c:/GNUstep/GNUstep/System/Library/Libraries -lobjc -lgnustep-base

with  the first “sample” replaced with what you want your end result to be called and the second “sample” replaced with your code file name.

I’ve been trying to figure it out for days.  While this solution isn’t ideal, I’ll stick with it.  I made a boilerplate comment header that I’ll use in all my files so I don’t forget what to do.  My program compiled and works perfectly minus some minor kvetching from the runtime.

Next entry, I’ll take a step back and explain what exactly I wrote.

And like most such places we have an IT department that thinks one size fits all when it comes to how computers are used and maintained.  Everybody’s a moron.  Everything has to be locked down.  It makes partial sense because most users are, shall we say, not technical and are prone to doing naughty things like peer-to-peer file sharing or unknowingly downloading malware plagued programs and worse.  It can cause major havoc on a network and result in downtime, etc.

I’m not the typical user.  I’m a programmer.  I have needs, damn it.  My biggest pet peeve is that FTP is disabled.  For starters, the only way the normies would even encounter FTP is if they actively sought it out through some client or entering a ftp:// address in the browser.  So the only way I can exchange files between the office and home is by e-mailing it to myself.  They don’t have Gmail turned off… yet.  And forget doing some upgrades or using my web site for anything remotely more creative than writing text through the WordPress software.  My assigned Windows box isn’t weak despite being nearly four years old.  It could handle a virtualized instance of Linux that I could use for development.  Hold on there, bucko.  Forget about updating that OS through that instance.  Firewall blocks it from getting external connections and it is very selective about what gets bandwidth and what doesn’t.  In the regular desktop environment, streaming videos and downloading files might as well be dial-up.  Typical text-based web pages are okay providing the nanny filter doesn’t block them outright with a warning.

What is a resource limited guy whose back is against a virtual wall to do?

Get creative.  Coding in Objective-C in Windows isn’t exactly a popular endeavor.  Everybody suggests doing it on a Mac because that’s where the most developers using it are.  Makes perfect sense.  I wouldn’t bother with .NET development in Linux even though it’s possible.  Same thing.  I had to do a surprising amount of research to figure it out.  Some said gcc includes the Objective-C compiler, some said it didn’t.  Then I learned there wasn’t a native gcc compiler for Windows that integrated well with the operating system and I’d have to grab something else to make it work, to set up a Linux-like environment.

Enter GNUstep.  I’d played with Cygwin in the past and it was clunky and pretty gross and a pain to install.  GNUstep gave me the interface needed to run Objective-C compiler from the command line, meaning I didn’t have to bother to learn my way around a Windows IDE (of which there are next to none with the language support I need).  It got me a huge step closer to being able to do what I wanted.  I tested the compiler via command line (very simple C program) and it seemed to be working.  Voila.  Finally, time to have fun.

I don’t want to do game reviews.  It seems so amateurish, a guy with no journalism credibility throwing up something on his rarely-visited blog that is intended to be taken seriously.  So what I’m going to do instead is tell reader(s) impressions.  No scores, no screenshots, no structure, just words.  Let the pros labor for hits.  I’m not pretending to write for a mass audience but to get my thoughts down on internet paper because I don’t really have anybody to discuss them with in real life.

Dragon Quest VI completes the DS trilogy that started with IV and peaked with V.  Yes, V is a much better game than VI, though it would have been very hard to top anyway because of the prior game’s structure of following a nameless hero and his descendants through history.  Doing some reading on the development of DQ6 and how they tried to make the journey more epic, it might seem questionable just by the fact of this statement: to make the game longer, they threw away the story.

What little story is there is decent.  Nameless Hero, who I always name Loto in honor of the original, is living in a small village and he soon sets out to become a man by leaving the village and seeing the world.  No big surprises there.  Not much later, a portal to a dream world is discovered that fills the main gimmick of the game.  Loto goes back and forth between the real world and the dream world, gradually exploring more and more of each.  It’s similar to DQ7 in that way.  Actually, DQ7 seems like a gigantic expansion pack to this game.  Once the overworld opens up though, the main quest suffers greatly.

8-4’s localization was a disappointment.  They must have listened to the snobs around the internet who hated the various written accents and kept it in plain-Jane English.  That area is where the post-VII American games really shined and it made the little stories and characters come to life so much more.  It was so much fun to read the text and say it as written on the screen in my head with the “oi”s and the slang and regional accents.  That might be another reason the story didn’t grab me much.

It even has a class system not seen since DQ3.  This one is much more fleshed out and there are lots of options to get that perfect unique party.  Unlike most games that have such a thing, all skills learned are permanent, future class changes or not.  That makes it actually worth it to try for well rounded individuals.

The charm in DQ is exploration, along which frequent yet speedy random battles happen.  Many diehard fans of the series claim there is no grind and it naturally happens through the exploration.  That’s half right.  Equipment matters far more than levels, at least until the final boss.  So leveling isn’t necessary but having the latest and greatest pieces are.  Said pieces are typically huge in cost and money rewards from battles are comparatively tiny.

It falls prey to the same thing that practically every DQ has.  About halfway through the game, the journey from town to town, partaking in small isolated plot sequences, you get a ship or some other method of transportation that opens up the overworld and you can go almost anywhere.  I hate non-linearity in games.  I like clear-cut objectives and goals on a fairly fixed path that leads me to the end, where I can wrap it up cleanly and move on to the next game in my over-fifty-strong backlog.  Side quests are fine as is straying off the predetermined path.  The key word is OPTIONAL.  If I have to consult a FAQ to figure out what to do next, I believe the game design has failed.  It was excusable in the 8-bit era when there were no real rules on how to make a decent game, but even with DQ’s adherence to tradition there’s no excuse for a (remade) SNES game to fall into the trap.  I will admit that the non-linear second half isn’t completely so.  There are alternate modes of transportation besides the ship that have to be obtained in a certain order and these fill out the rest of the world map and allow players to access the areas they need to eventually finish the quest.

In a lot of ways, I’m noticing that a lot of this writing can be copy and pasted and applied to any DQ game.  The series doesn’t change a whole heck of a lot.  But where others may call it archaic, I call it consistent.  You generally always know what you’re getting into when a new entry in the series is released.  You’re either a fan or you’re not.

Over a third of my play clock was spent grinding for the final boss, around 20 hours out of 55.  Without mega spoilers, he has three forms.  The first two go down fairly easily, even at level 40 when I first tried it.  But the last form is one of those situations where you have to kill body parts.  Those things can revive each other so focusing attacks all on one is a sure path to defeat.  You have to kill them nearly all at the same time.  It wouldn’t have been impossible on the first try but I had only one decent healer and getting walloped and having a party member die every turn was the incentive I needed to grind for a long time for new classes and abilities and come back to dominate.  Which I did.

Will I keep going with the series?  Absolutely.  For all the nitpicky flaws I listed, it’s still a hell of a game and I get things from it that nobody else provides.  However, VI is ranked near the bottom in the post-IV group, VII and VIII included (latter of which to me is the definite bottom).  But I doubt I’ll ever play it again, something I can’t say for the others.

Although I have spent years just barely on the edge of serious development, I’ve had an Apple developer account almost from day one of owning the Mac Mini back in 2006.  It beat MSDN in so many ways but the most useful to me is the free access to all the documentation about the OS.  But it was very daunting.  I hadn’t had much experience with object-oriented programming.  My formal schooling was spent mostly with C on the software side or SQL on the database side, with some rare deviation into C++ and Visual Basic.  With those latter two, technically I was doing OOP but the true nature of what that meant hadn’t clicked with me.  My motto used to be:  give me procedural or give me death.

A few years later when I went back to school in an ill-fated attempt at securing the bachelor’s degree, I took a true OOP class.  It was sink or swim time.  I had to change my whole way of thinking.  Yes, yes, everything is an object, it’s not that hard to understand.  But that was a microcosmic view and I couldn’t make the leaps and jumps in the big picture to get how those objects came together to form a fully functioning program (or app, as is the big buzzword now).  Though it was a challenge and much more time spent debugging than a normal sane person, I came out the other side with the fundamentals in place.

Then I got lazy.  Really, really lazy.  Met a girl, moved in with her, got engaged, got married, now three weeks shy of my first child’s due date.  Where did the time go?  Playing video games mostly, but I digress.

The Macbook Air line was retooled in October.  I hesitate to call it a refresh because that just implies a minor spec bump.  These puppies got new case designs (pointy!) and a full dedication to solid state storage.  They got my notice.  I’ve been using a beefy Macbook Pro for nearly three years now and thinking back, that’s the longest time I’ve gone without buying a new computer since I snagged my first one, Mac-based or otherwise.  It’s been a reliable machine, minus a logic board replacement in the first few months of its life.  It’s a desktop replacement.  There’s no avoiding that fact.  As such, it weighs quite a bit when lugged around in a bag, standing around waiting, or holding on my lap.  The fans are incessant and the slightest things rev them up, making the thing sound like it’s going to launch into space.  Flash, okay, that’s unavoidable on the Mac platform because Adobe writes terrible code.  I’m so glad it is banned on my iPhone or I wouldn’t be able to hold the thing, it would be so hot to the touch.  But transferring files or syncing the phone?  Vroom, vroom, vroom.  I’m pretty much over it.  The Airs appealed to me because of the portability and the SSD drives.  Until late last year, I’d never be able to afford one plus they were ridiculously underpowered.  Now that they are available and my current buddy is getting long in the tooth, it’s shaping up to be the perfect time to move on.

I can’t pull the trigger just yet.  I have three Core (2) Duo Macs.  Getting yet another would be, well, pointless when there are i5 and i7 commonplace chips out there that are light years ahead and most Macs already have them.  After a lot of research I found out more about laptop processors, graphics cards, wattage, heat, etc.  The megahertz myth is a myth indeed.  There might even be a bit of a label myth as well as the chipset name (Penryn, Merom, etc.) matters more.  The latest Intels are Sandy Bridge and they are a lot more efficient and rugged while still being in the very same i-series as the ones last year.  Big jump in quality though.  A perfect storm is gathering.  Later this year all signs are pointing to an Air spec bump to Sandy Bridge.  That’s when I’ll snag one.  Sooner the better of course.  I played with the 11” and the 13” Airs in Best Buy last week and fell in love.  I’m glad I have just enough self-control not to just hand over my credit card and go home with one of those beauties.

Now, due to some tweaking and maintenance, the fans on the Macbook Pro seem to be finally under control.  My setup is a closed laptop connected to an external monitor, which already is one strike against proper heat management.  This raises the question: what will I be able to do with the Air that I can’t do with the Pro?  The answer is portability.  I don’t want to be chained to the desk over what I’m sure will be hours of coding.  I want to be able to take it to a quiet place like the library or around the house while I’m making sure my daughter doesn’t get into too much mischief.  Plus I have a little brother who’s only 11 that I visit every weekend and we play online games together in person.  Yeah that concept doesn’t make much sense but it’s fun and it’s currently a pain to pack up the weighty Pro in a big bag.  I want to be able to slip in and go (zing!).

I’m heavily leaning towards the 13”.  Balance between power and portability.  The 11” is just too tiny when I’m going to need multiple windows open (Spaces helps but isn’t perfect).  I don’t do much intensive stuff but for the rare game or movie encode, I’d rather the thing not explode or grind to a slow trickle.

Oh… wasn’t I supposed to be talking about coding?  Ah, that’ll have to wait until next time.  An Objective-C approaches!  Command?

From the perspective of a guy who grew up in the full blown whirl and crazy rapid evolution of personal computer technology, the game changer was Windows 95.  My family never had an Apple computer or one of those IBM clones.  But from the time that awesome “Start Me Up” ad campaign hit, it was a new world.  Windows was the king of the hill and GUI was here to stay forever.  Elementary school wasn’t the last time I’d used a computer and I had played with a Mac or two and assorted windowed interfaces from time to time.  But now normal people could afford and use computer with a minimum of fuss, the dream that had been dreamed in the industry since the early 80s.  Seemingly right after Windows 95, the internet hit.  AOL, CompuServe, etc. were as important to the computing experience as the interface was.

Playing with Windows boxes at friends’ houses had visions of Microsoft dancing in my head.  Eventually I was able to convince my mother, a fairly new elementary school teacher herself, that we needed to get one of our own.  Doing a bit of research in the time before Google, I read PCs for Dummies or something similar and browsed local newspaper ads.  Coming across one from CompUSA, I saw one page they had devoted to Apple machines.  I had paid attention when the iMac was first revealed by the returning Steve Jobs.  By this point though, Apple computers seemed so foreign to me.  For one, they were bloody expensive (a feature that more or less went away with Jobs’ return) for a Performa or whatever their unit du jour was at the time.  They were also just… weird.  I was now coming of age in the time of Windows and with fears of incompatibility or worse, I never really gave the company that had birthed my passion a chance.

My first experience with programming was on a TI-82 graphing calculator that I got in high school.  Everybody that had one (I believe it was a requirement for algebra) would swap around these freeware programs that somebody somewhere in the world had made, everything from Diablo clones to skiing simulators.  Going into the code was a cinch and we would all change variables to cheat in the games or write mini programs from scratch that would let us cheat to answer test questions.  It was like Dungeons and Dragons for me: something I’d seen from afar that I could only really get into if it was thrust on me.  From there I took a BASIC, a C, and a C++ class (pun sorta kinda intended).  Eventually I would major in it and get a job doing related things.  Because my area wasn’t exactly a hotbed of technology, I had more or less resigned myself to working a version of Visual Basic for the rest of my career.

Reality and interests can be total opposites.  When Apple introduced the Mac Mini, my ears and eyes perked up.  Finally here was an Apple computer I could afford!  With a thousand percent more knowledge and know-how than I’d had in high school through secondary education, self-learning, and the internet for research at my disposal, things were looking good for my long belated reunion with the company’s products.  The PowerPC legacy held me back from biting down immediately.  Stereotype or not, the perception was out there that x86 machines were far superior in performance than IBM’s stalwart.  I wasn’t a millionaire by that point (still waiting) and I wanted something that would have lasting value for somebody that didn’t buy a new computer every year.  Six months later, the transition to Intel was announced.  I was ready to get wet.  The new Macbook Pro and the iMac came first.  The Mac Mini was next.  I dove.

It wasn’t your daddy’s Mac.  OS X blew my mind.  Windows was all but a memory, minus my day job where I have no choice.  One of the first things I tried out though was Xcode.  It has one of the major problems of coding today: you have to learn the IDE almost as much as you have to learn a language itself.  You can’t just load it up and start coding right away.  There’s projects and boilerplate code and so many other bells and whistles that, when mastered, definitely reduce the time it takes to produce something big.  But it’s a very steep learning hurdle to overcome.

I’ve put off learning Objective-C, Cocoa, and other Mac-specific things for years now even on my third Mac machine (late 2008 Macbook Pro in case anybody cares).  Now that the Mac App Store has launched and I can have an easy financial incentive to finally hunker down and develop for the Mac, I’ve run out of excuses.

That’s where I am now.  My goal is to have a good product up on the store.  Xcode 4 just came out and the amount of stuff I can do with it is incredible.  I just have to learn how to use it.  I want to use this blog to document my journey from clueless rookie to seasoned veteran.  Let’s rock.