chanson

Panther shipped!

That means I can go into more detail about what I'm talking about at the CAWUG meeting on Tuesday.

Here's the deal: In Panther, Cocoa includes a ton of new features. Most importantly, Panther Cocoa includes a new AppKit class named NSController.

In Model-View-Controller terms, Cocoa has historically been great for building model objects with FoundationKit and for building view objects with AppKit. But you've generally had to build all of your controller objects from scratch with FoundationKit. This isn't a problem per se but it does mean you have to do work. For instance, you had to write a data source object have an NSTableView display some data.

Now, with Panther Cocoa and NSController you can very easily bind view objects to your data model directly, with no code, right in Interface Builder.

It does this using some technology built on top of Key-Value Coding. Key-Value Observing lets one object watch for changes in an attribute of another and Key-Value Binding lets the values of attributes in two objects be dependent on each other (change one and the other changes).

On Tuedsay at CAWUG, I'm going to demonstrate how all this fits together.

But wait, there's more!

Apple also did quite a bit of optimization work in Panther, including optimizations to how NSView drawing works.

They've even included a new class in FoundationKit called NSSortDescriptor that represents — surprise — a way of sorting a collection! It's pretty much an equivalent of my BDSortOrdering class, which was just a reimplementation of the Enterprise Objects Framework's EOSortOrdering class.

I'll also be talking about some of the other major additions to Cocoa in Panther. There's a lot of cool stuff to cover! Join us! It'll be fun!

I'm going to be talking at the next Cocoa and WebObjects User Group (CAWUG) meeting. It's at 7PM next Tuesday, October 28, at the Apple Store North Michigan Avenue.

Alex Johnson of Site9 maintains an iCal calendar (subscribe via iCal).

Here's the summary of Chuck's IOKit talk and what I'm allowed to say about my talk. I'll post more details tonight about what I'll actually be covering, after Panther's officially released.

IOKit by Chuck Remes

Chuck has worked on an ethernet driver for the DEC Tulip chip set and will discuss IOKit. IOKit provides all the basic services to develop a hardware or software driver for darwin (or OS X). It is a powerful toolkit that let's the programmer bring all the power of OOP to the world of drivers, allowing such things as subclassing, method overload, and driver stacking. This presentation will provide a high-level 45 minute overview of some of its basic features and principles.

Xcode & new Cocoa features in Panther by Chris Hanson

Chris Hanson of bDistributed.com will go over some of the additions to Cocoa included in Panther, as well as the new Xcode IDE and the updated Interface Builder.

I'm giving a short presentation at the next Chicago Cocoa and WebObjects User Group (CAWUG) meeting this coming Tuesday.

Jon Rentzsch is going to give an overview of Direct to Web, the rule-based system for generating web applications automatically from your data model in WebObjects. Following Jon, I'll be discussing BDRuleEngine, my Open Source framework for building rule-based Cocoa appliations.

More details, including the location, time, and where you need to RSVP if you're thinking about attending are in the meeting announcement at StepWise.

(The RSVP thing is important because the meetings are at Apple's office in the Mercantile Exchange Building in the Chicago Loop, which became access-controlled after September 11, 2001.)