GUI Programming for Mac OS X
Posted by Daniel Lyons Tue, 15 May 2007 04:23:00 GMT
It seems a little petty to want something other than Cocoa/Objective-C on your Mac, since it’s light years beyond the dreams of most other platforms. Still, one desires to do as little work as possible. The “joys” of manual garbage collection and a poor iteration interface are going to be that much harder to bear knowing that they’re going to go away with the introduction of Objective-C “2.0” and Leopard.
I remembered F-Script. I was hoping that I would see a simple way to write a whole app in F-Script and deliver it as a standalone executable, NIBs and all, but I haven’t run into that yet. I hope it’s out there though, that would be a lot simpler than using Objective-C. I think this would be a really enjoyable development environment.
Interestingly, I found a way to do this with Ruby and Ruby-Cocoa using the newcocoa gem. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like it was going to make a universal binary, because I’ve got MacPorts installed. I might go back to that though, because that would be a lot better for application deployment. It seemed to do everything with NIBs properly and all that jazz. On the other hand, it opens up the delivering the source-code with the product problem.
For fun, I thought I would look for a Haskell binding. I don’t remember it before, but apparently there is this HOC (Haskell Objective-C) binding. It hasn’t been developed for a while, but it’s worth looking into. The mailing list is largely dead but according to the most recent post in March, it’s working still. I didn’t see if it uses NIBs and everything.
Now that would be awesome.
