
Iphone Tutorial: Creating a RSS Feed Reader - oscardelben
http://cocoadevblog.com/iphone-tutorial-creating-a-rss-feed-reader
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samratjp
Neat. When you're ready for more, be sure to check out
<http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iphonedev/> for a quick dive into Objective-C +
iPhone SDk. Then to get a non-trivial Hello World, check out
this:[http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-
bin/drupal/download...](http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-
bin/drupal/downloads-2010-winter)

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Aaronontheweb
Thanks for those links - both of those plus the OP's post look really
instructive for Objective C noobs like me.

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ireadzalot
This one at Stack Overflow is a good resource as
well:[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1939/howto-articles-
for-i...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1939/howto-articles-for-iphone-
development-objective-c)

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al_james
Yuck! After all these years of high level languages, having to use a mid-level
language like objective-c to develop for iPhone feels like a step backwards!
If only HTML5 / phonegap was more of a viable option.

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xsmasher
I'm finding Objective-C to be a powerful addition to C and refreshingly simple
compared to C++. What are you comparing it to, and what should I be missing?

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probablycorey
You are right, compared to C++ and C ObjC has advantages. But compared to
other langues it has major drawbacks. Here are some reasons I don't like
Objective-C (these mostly apply to iPhone dev only)

\- Header Files: These are archaic and require you to repeat code
unnecessarily. Don't require humans to do something that computers are better
at.

\- No Automatic Garbage Collection: On the ObjC 2.0 we have this, but not on
the iPhone. Unless you are making a high performance game, there is no reason
the phone can't handle Automatic GC.

\- No NSDictionary/NSArray literals: [[NSDictionary alloc]
initWithObjectsAndKeys:@"value", @"key", @"value2", @"key2", nil]; // Enough
said

\- No regex: You kind of get regex's in 3.2, but they are very limited. Regex
literals are much more powerful

\- Xcode: You are pretty much required to use Xcode and I don't like Xcode.
Even if you use the "xcodebuild" command-line script, you still have to create
the project through Xcode.

\- Closures: I guess we will be able to use these soon, but it is going to
take awhile for all the API's to get updated to accommodate them.

\- No dynamic variables: It's handy to be able to shove data into objects
sometimes. It's a hack, but as long as you treat it as such you can save a lot
of needless code. (You can do this via the ObjC runtime, but it's messy)

\- No namespacing: ObjC handles namespaces by prefixing class names. Blah,
that is so 1978.

\- Unit Testing: ObjC has the poorest excuse for unit testing out of any
language I've ever used.

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wrs
It's not technically a language thing, but I can't get used to the
unbelievable verbosity of the method names. (And for calibration purposes: I
used to do a lot of Common Lisp.)

In a language inspired by Smalltalk, they turned "at:" into "objectAtIndex:"?

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emehrkay
I'm going to comment on this to act as a bookmark.

Thanks for the post

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jasonlotito
FYI: Anything you upvote get's "saved" for you. Just click on your name, find
the "saved" link, and it will show you all the things you upvoted for easy
reference. =)

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emehrkay
Thanks

