Same but Different

I've started working on the Cocoa book. It's an interesting contrast with the process we went through for the iPhone book. Though there are tremendous similarities between Cocoa and Cocoa Touch and, of course, they both use the same programming language, it is very different writing about something that's new, immature, and undergoing constant changes than it is writing about something that's been around, in some form, for over twenty years.

Yeah, NextSTEP's first public appearance was in 1986, and it's first full release was in 1989. That means that this September, Cocoa will officially be twenty years old, but people have been developing and working on it for roughly twenty-three years. Despite that, the NextSTEP of 1986, would still be surprisingly recognizable to most of us.

The bright side of it all, for me (and I assume Dave), is that we probably won't have to write any chapter more than once this time. WIth the iPhone book, the first several chapters literally got re-written three or four times because the SDK was changing so much back then, and with the NDA we were all under back then, we had very few resources we could use to double-check what we were saying. That's not the case with Cocoa, so I'm optimistic that this is going to be a less stressful writing experience.

Anyway, I know some of you are still waiting for that particle generator code. Unfortunately, I ripped it apart to re-write the drawing code, and haven't had time to put the pieces back together again. I'm hoping to find some time to finish it and the accompanying blog-posting, but it seems that work comes in faster these days than I can finish it. Given the economy, I'm not about to complain about that, but it does mean that realistically, it may be a little while longer before I can get the Particle System code out the door.

One final note: I had hoped to attend the 360 iDev Conference in San Jose in March. While my speaker proposals haven't been officially rejected, it looks like they've firmed up the speaker list, and I'm not on it. So unfortunately, it doesn't look like I'm going to make it out there for that particular conference. I will definitely be at WWDC, so I do hope to meet more of you there.