I’m learning Objective-C and Cocoa, starting from the beginning. I toyed with it a few years ago (via GnuStep), but never went anywhere with it. GnuStep wasn’t inspiring, and there wasn’t much of a market for it at the time.

I’m deeply impressed by the visual beauty of what gets built for platforms, with their tools, and the quality of the websites and texts surrounding them. It seems like a shallow heuristic, but every ounce of inspiration counts when wrangling complexities, and any excess of quality (or lack thereof) cannot be ignored. Crafting software is hard. Beauty is elusive. So when tools that bleed excellence, there’s a reason. And it’s stupid to ignore it–if you want have a chance of building great software.

And while I will continue to use and enjoy Linux, it’s time to jump into the land of Mac. Neat stuff is happening there, and I’m often in awe of the software built for it. I’ll still build web stuff too, but I need at least one good rich platform in my toolkit, and Windows isn’t it (and a commercial market for Linux desktop apps may never happen).

Speaking of beautiful sites, here’s today’s Objective-C/Cocoa reading:

• Core Animation Sample Code: NanoLife (TheoCacao)
• Learn Objective-C (Cocoa DevCentral)