Objective C for Absolute Beginners, Review and Discount

Everyone who worked with computers back in the 8 bit days thinks of himself as a programmer. I’m no different. I remember the days …

 10 Print “Hello World”
 20 Goto 10

I even tried my hand at assembly code at which, in hindsight, I was terrible.

So fast forwarding 20 (or 30) years I still like the idea of pushing pixels around the screen and want to pick it up again. I’m not looking for a new career. I just think as a hobbyist (and Mac nerd), it would be fun to understand Xcode more. I’ve bought a few books for this purpose over the years. The problem is, I never seem to finish them.
I am probably not the only one who buys a programming book with the greatest intentions and never makes it to the end. The reason for this is that the landscape of programming has changed so much since I was “in the game” that I can’t keep up with a book that takes anything for granted. I need the basics. That is what led me to read Objective-C for Absolute Beginners by Gary Bennett, Mitch Fisher, and Brad Lees.

If you are looking to get started with Xcode, this is the book. The point of an objective based programming language is working with, well … objects. The trouble is, applying (and learning) the basic concepts of Objective-C objects requires a lot more knowledge of Objective-C than just the basics. As a result, a lot of new programmers get stuck at the gate.
The authors have a solution. They use the open source Alice Project to teach basic objective programming concepts and then move back to Xcode to use those principals with Objective-C.

The title gets it right. This book is for absolute beginners. You can pick it up without a lick of programming knowledge and (with a little patience) work your way through the book. If you are looking to get a working knowledge of Objective-C, this one is for you.

Discount Code

The publisher has a 25% discount for MacSparky readers. If you are interested buy it here and enter the discount code “MACSPARKYDFT”.

TeuxDeux

TeuxDeux is a gorgeous Web/iOS based simple task list. If it weren’t for the fact that my own task list is insane (requiring OmniFocus’ Death Star-like ability to obliterate tasks), I’d be so on this.

OmniFocus 1.8

The OmniGroup released a significant update to OmniFocus.

This update is all about customization. The View Bar has expanded to include groups, projects, and Inbox items. Also, groups and projects can now become next actions. No longer are you required to switch to Planning mode to finish up a project. Also, Perspectives are easier. You can even drag them out of the Perspectives Window to share.

OmniFocus also now cleans up after itself when you change views. The days of hammering Command-K to clean up are over.

Less sexy but more practical, the Omni Group continues to fine tune synchronization. I’m not sure when it happened, but between Omni’s continuing synchronization tweaks and the increasing processor and memory speeds on the iOS devices, I’m now taking fast reliable OmniFocus sync for granted.

I signed up for the OmniFocus sneaky-peaks and watched 1.8 develop over the last several months. Having watched new builds drop at every hour of the day, I’m convinced the folks at Omni don’t sleep and I’m okay with that.

PDFpen 5

Today Smile announced the release of PDFpen, version 5. I’ve been running the beta for a few months and am impressed with the update.

  • It’s 64 bit and runs circles around my aging copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional 8. I don’t think there is anything better on the Mac for handling large PDFs.
  • Multi-core OCR, speedy text recognition.
  • Search, Replace, and Redact: Find your secret data and erase it.
  • Deskew. Fix botched scan jobs.

PDFpen is a great value at a fraction of Adobe Acrobat’s cost and the features us mortals need the most.