Things to look for when programming in Cocoa(using Objective-C)

For all the power you get from dynamic typing, you also get the power to really “hurt yourself”.Because Objective-C is dynamically typed, one must pay really close attention to the warnings the compiler generates. Often these “warnings” are the compiler telling you that something won’t work at runtime. For example, a common warning is something like(and these are my own words): “I am not sure this receiver accepts this message”. That means you are probably not sending the right message to the object (message member function, receiver object(pointer to the object). Also, pay close attention to the “Run Log” of Xcode when you are debugging. Any runtime exceptions, while cryptic at first, will make a lot of sense once you gain a bit of experience with Cocoa

My Ruby screencasts have been uploaded

Update(May 2007) Update: I am not updating my Vuze page anymore. Instead the videos at ShowMeDo contain the latest comments and any future updates.

Update: VLC player on the Mac works fine with the .MOV files. I don’t know about other platforms

Clarification: Approximately 1 minute 58 seconds into the second movie, I talk about the “part where you encounter them first”. I’m not sure that’s accurate. If you just remember to let the interpreter know about instance variables by initializing them in the constructor(def init), you should be fine. Just define your class variables before def init

I created these late at night, so let me know of inaccuracies. These should work fine with QuickTime player(I don’t think VLC player supports the encoding for these particular files and I don’t recommend using VLC for these videos, as it crashed).

The first part deals with basic Ruby for people already familiar with Object Oriented Programming. The second part discusses the bioinformatics code I dabbled with.

Unfortunately, downloading the movie automatically installs Azureus. You can uninstall Azureus if you want, after you are finished downloading.

You may also notice that I proceed slowly in these screencasts. I’ll write down detailed scripts to proceed more quickly in the future :p

Part I:

Part II: