The two terms seems to be used inter changeably.
Is my understanding correct that Cocoa Touch refers to the framework that handles touch whereas Objective-C is just the syntax and language used to interact with this framework?
Much like WPF and C#?
Yes, Objective-C is just a platform-agnostic programming language, whereas Cocoa Touch is Apple's proprietary framework for writing iPhone/iPad apps, and this happens to be written in Objective C.
Related
It appears the language is the same for either device ios or mac os on a mbp, but if I learn Objective-C in a tutorial, won't I also need to learn cocoa or cocoa touch to program effectively?
I'm not sure how to start on my path of learning to program an ios device. I know I need to learn objective-c and that appears to work on all apple products. Then do I move to cocoa touch for ipad and iphone? What comes after objective-c?
The type of project is akin to a web app but native objective-c app instead. Have ui, buttons, the app hits some back end location, returns data, I put it on that same ui. Only, as stated, use objective-c and whatever framework and library to do it (that's my dilemma. I dont know what to do next after objective-c).
thanks.
Cocoa and Objective-c go hand in hand. For getting started, I would suggest going over some old WWDC footage and following some of the examples there.
As far as Cocoa and Cocoa touch are concerned, they are very similar in many aspects, same name conventions, similar structure, etc. Learn one, and you can easily pick up the other.
#craig adds:
I would further this answer by also mentioning that Objective-C is a programming language, while Cocoa/Cocoa Touch are collections of frameworks that are provided by Apple, and used by developers to add functionality to their programs. (Which are written in Objective-C.) The Cocoa frameworks contain various UI components like buttons, table views, sliders, etc. in addition to various fundamental classes like NSString and other text- and graphics-based APIs
I started my learning by watching thenewboston's xcode tutorials:
you can begin with this one
Good luck :)
I prefer books for some strange reason and I found that the Apress series of IOS development is really good. The book goes through developing iPhone and iPad apps using all kinds of Cocoa libraries. There's a lot of good books out there on the subject; I would go find one that looks like it would suit your needs.
The rejection of a recent edit I suggested gave me doubts about something I thought I knew on Objective-C.
I've lived under the assumption that the UIViews are part of iOS, that iOS is a descendant of Objective-C and that Objective-C has no default kits with any views.
I've tried some Google and Stack Overflow searches, but the results didn't seem trustworthy and were mostly about UIViews. Wikipedia seems to mention nothing about this .
Does Objective-C have views? Or is that, as I assumed before, a common misunderstanding?
The problem that I see is that iOS is NOT a descendant of Objective C.
iOS is the operating system (like Windows Linux OSX) whilst Objective-C is a programming language albeit one that most iOS and OSX apps are written in. However there are iOS apps written in Python and other languages,
iOS as such does not have views - these are part of the Cocoa-touch framework which is a set of libraries that run on iOS and can be called with Objective C code. Although in practice for the programmer the difference between calling code in iOS and Cocoa touch is not really clear if you are only writing for iOS devices, the split is clearer in OSX where you can write code just using OSX calls or can use Cocoa frameworks.
As noted the views are part of the Cocoa touch framework. This can be called by any language including Objective - C. Most languages do not include the ability to write GUIS as part of itself they usually make use of separate libraries to do this. For example Objective C has no GUI libraries itself but has had Cocoa touch written for iOS, Cocoa and Carbon (although that mainly uses a C binding) for OSX and GNUStep for Windows and Unix like OSes (and historically NeXTStep, OpenStep, Rhapsody, basically earlier versions of Cocoa, on various OSs and Stepstone's ICPak 201)
Objective-C is the open source programming language. UIKit(iOS) and AppKit(Mac OS) are what provide the visual elements - and this is not open source.
Objective-C itself doesn't have a UI, that's provided by other frameworks.
From what I have understood obj-c's views are part of the UIKit framework : check here
which is designed for constructing GUI applications on the iOS.
I don't think you can use this framework in other obj-c applications but on iOS. Probably there are other frameworks that have views which can be used.
Edit: And yes, good point by #Mark that you are confusing the Operating System with the Programming Language
I want to ask an very basic question about the iPhone application. what does mean of the the 'Cocoa' in iPhone application? Is there are relateionship between the memory management and the Cocoa? thank you very much.
Cocoa is just the code name for one of the Apple API's, originally provided on the Mac (I used to code for that on my old iMac). One of the others was Carbon.
Wikipedia has a more in-depth description that will do it far more justice than my brief snippet above.
Cocoa is the primary Mac OS X API. For iPhone development, a variant of this API called Cocoa Touch is used.
Apps developed for Cocoa can take advantage of a garbage collector, but this is not available in Cocoa Touch applications, where the application must ensure it manages allocation and destruction correctly.
Cocoa is the Apple API, the set of technical tools (not talking about IDE here) delivered by Apple in order to develop MacOS X applications. Cocoa Touch is the iPhone application API.
When you mention Memory Management in Objective-C on Mac/iPhone, you usually mean methods and of NSObject (retain, release, autorelease, retainCount). This feature is provided by the Foundation library, which is a part of Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.
However, Objective-C is now tightly connected to Mac and iPhone development, it is not unusual to assimilate Foundation to the language.
I want to ask a question about the objective C. Do the objective C and iOS 4 support the caldav? Thank you very much.
Objective-C is just the programming language. So itself it does not support this kind of stuff. Cocoa Touch is the framework that could support such a thing. But it doesn't. The only thing you can is access calendars from the calendar app. But there is no support to directly deal with CalDAV. But you could for e.g. use a third party lib like libical (http://sourceforge.net/projects/freeassociation/)
I do not have a Mac, or an iPhone. However, the concept of taking C and making it more dynamic towards the idea of smalltalk, python or ruby is really attractive to me. I'd love to start on objective C.
Is objective C just a syntax superset of C or is it really like C. As in, can it be compiled with gcc etc..?
I do most of my programming in Ruby. Objective C seems so much more forgiving than C. You can write native extensions for Ruby in C. Can you write native extensions for Ruby in Objective C?
How can I get started with Objective C outside of owning an Mac/iPhone and having XCode?
Wikipedia says
Today it is used primarily on Apple's
Mac OS X and iPhone OS, two
environments based on, although not
compliant with, the OpenStep standard,
and it is the primary language used
for Apple's Cocoa API though it was
originally used as the main language
on NeXT's NeXTSTEP OS. Generic
Objective-C programs which do not make
use of these libraries can also be
compiled for any system supported by
gcc, which includes an Objective-C
compiler.
Objective-C today is often used in
tandem with a fixed library of
standard objects (often known as a
"kit" or "framework"), such as Cocoa
or GNUstep.
Maybe you should get a Linux vm if you are mainly running Windows and get GNUStep running.
apple contributed the objective c changes back to gcc (not that they had much choice, being GPL). So wherever you can set up gcc, you can set up an objective-c compiler.
Beyond that, the Gnustep environment can give you a bit of the flavor of the original OpenStep/NextStep environment.
Yes, you can write, compile and run objective c programs outside a MAC/IPhone
Please check the link below for details
http://www.otierney.net/objective-c.html#settingup
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/computer-lang/Objective-C/faq/
There's a difference between Objective-C the language, and the frameworks that Apple has built on top of it. Those frameworks consist of a bunch of objects which you can use in your code and are especially helpful if you're targeting the Mac or the iPhone. There are some similar objects for parts of it in GNUStep, but it's not a complete replacement for the Cocoa/etc library and especially doesn't cover anything iPhone related.
GNUStep and the Objective-C language (via gcc) are available for many platforms, and you can write your own programs that use Objective-C objects and interact with any C api from Objective-C.
Objective-C is a superset of C and so is not really more forgiving than C, but it is arguably more forgiving than C++ (an almost-superset of C). You can also mix Objective-C and C++ with GCC but that gets a little complicated, especially regarding exception handling.
For getting started and playing around with the language though, GNUStep and GCC would be a good way to go.
I don't see any compelling reason why you cannot use Objective C for native ruby extensions, except that you won't benefit much. You will still have to use the lower level C Api calls, since as far as i know, there aren't any ruby to objective-c bindings. Additionally, Objective C comes with a fairly substantial library of utility classes that, while helpful, won't easily justify their size and weight in the context of a ruby extension.
You can you this page for simple experiments with ObjC: http://www.codesign.cz/LearnObjC/