Update

Since I haven’t posted anything here for a while. I wanted to give a quick update on what’s going on.

My new Unibody MacBookPro is brilliant. I just missed out on the latest update with the inbuilt battery, but I don’t feel I have missed out on much. I wouldn’t use the SD reader but the extra battery life would be very nice. Either way I’m happy, I have more power than I need and it’s a beautiful piece of engineering. Mmm.

Since finishing off University for the semester I’ve really gotten into Objective-C / Cocoa programming for the Mac, and maybe the iPhone. I grabbed Cocoa Programming for Mac OSX which seems to be the standard book on the subject. So far I really like the book, it’s a bit different in that you really cannot just sit down and read through it, instead you need a Mac handy and a spare hour or so to get hands on with the material. On reflection this is the natural format for someone like Aaron Hillegass, who runs training courses on this stuff. My approach so far has been to read a chapter or so on the train in the morning and work through the exercises in the evening. I’m making pretty good progress and I can really see why people get excited about Cocoa UI development, you can get a lot working with very little code. I’m maybe a third of the way through the book and given my pace I’ll be finished within 2 weeks.

Alongside the Cocoa book, I’ve started downloading the iPhone Application Programming Videos from Stanford, via iTunes. The contrast with the heavy hands on approach of Hillegass is nice, meaning I can sit back and take things in slowly.

Maybe I’ll become an Objective-C hacker?