My new MacBook

 

This Monday I received a MacBook so I could create an iPhone application. 

This is the first time I'm using a Mac since my mom brought home something like this before I was in highschool.  This is also the first time I'll be using a linux type of system since college.  Needless to say I'm very excited.

I've started playing with it a little.  I downloaded XCode and the iPhone SDK.  You can see in the photo that I learned how to change the background color.  I think this is probably one of the most common things people do right after turning on a new computer for the first time.

After using C# for the last bunch of years, Objective-C is like getting in a time machine and going back 10 years.  So many practices that I've come to take for granted are gone.  I'm doubt I'll ever come to grips with the "NS" prefix for everything. 

At the same time, the MVC framework to Cocoa seems pretty cool.  And the idea of message-passing for dynamic invocation of methods in a strongly typed system is very interesting.

In addition to my thoughts and feelings about the platform, framework, language, hardware, etc. it's also cool to be starting from scratch again.  I barely know how to save a file on the Mac.  I haven't explicitly used a pointer in almost 10 years.  I'm excited to see what the learning curve is like and exactly what programming skills really do transfer between languages, frameworks, etc.  I've been learning F#, haskell, python, and ruby out of personal curiosity but now I have to actually build something in Objective-C.  Should be interesting.