Sugar Maple Software

IronCoder 4 is over. Congratulations to Jonathan Wight for winning. His SpaceCam application is quite impressive. Thanks to Mark Dalrymple for choosing a cool theme (space) and API (Core Image) and judging the competition. Thanks to all the IronCoders for participating.

I wanted to programatically open a URL in the associated application. I started in Xcode’s Developer Documentation and searched for openURL which seemed like a good method name. I found the NSWorkspace class’ openURL method. I love it when that happens. One line of code later and I was opening URLs.

I’ve been trying to clear my plate for this weekend so I can participate in IronCoder 4. Since I work best under pressure, this is a great way for me to expand and refine my Cocoa skills.

If you are interested, you can learn more on the IronCoder website and the #macsb IRC channel. (Yes, IRC. Until this week, I probably hadn’t used IRC since 1992. If you are in a similar position, don’t worry; the clients are much better now. Freenode’s FAQ was helpful in figuring out how to register my nick.)

My honeymoon with Cocoa lasted about two weeks before I found myself having to invoke a Carbon API since the Cocoa one didn’t support the features I wanted. I wanted my application to speak some text, but I wanted to configure various speech-related properties. The NSSpeechSynthesizer class is extremely easy to use, but doesn’t provide access to any speech-related property other than the voice. So, I was off to read up on the Speech Synthesis Manager (which I remember as just the Speech Manager). While I think it would be great if NSSpeechSynthesizer exposed all of the features available in the Speech Synthesis Manager, I’m not going to rake another Carbon library over the coals; that’s already been done quite well. Instead, I’m going to share the problems I encountered and the solutions I found when integrating the Speech Synthesis Manager into my Cocoa application.

Once I setup Perforce, I created an Xcode project for my first application for Mac OS X. Since I’m building a Cocoa application that isn’t document-based, I started with the Red Sweater Cocoa Application Xcode template which is reportedly based on Jon Wight’s CocoaApp template. Within a minute, I had an application running that displayed a nice about box. Thanks to Daniel and Jon for sharing their templates!

When learning a new programming language or technology, I learn best by working through a book with lots of examples and tutorials. I learned HyperTalk by reading Danny Goodman’s The Complete HyperCard Handbook, I learned C by reading Dave Mark’s Learn C on the Macintosh, and I learned C++ by reading his Learn C++ on the Macintosh. (Actually, I didn’t really learn C++ until I read Bjarne Stroustrup’s Design and Evolution of C++.) So, when it was time to learn Objective C and Cocoa, I looked for a book. I bought Aaron Hillegass’ Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X and I was not disappointed.