A Nexus for the Cocoa Developer Community

I am working on a way to help co-ordinate the various and disparate Cocoa community resources and also focus development goals and efforts for new Cocoa frameworks. Why am I doing this? I suggested the idea on Apple’s cocoadev mailing list and a number of people said that they thought it was a good idea, and started emailing me positive feedback and offers to contribute. I couldn’t just send them packing! I’m also big on organization, even when it’s just casual. As a new developer planning on staking my career (at least partially) on the success of Cocoa and OS X, I don’t want to just sit on my butt waiting for Apple to attract developers and otherwise improve Cocoa’s prospects on my behalf. I know it’s in their best interest and they’ll do everything in their power, but why not consolidate the voices of Cocoa developers as a way to represent ourselves outside of our community. We could also provide a mechanism for quickly getting feedback on particular issues and gathering statistical data on developers and their needs.

All of the existing Cocoa-centric websites around offer different takes on Cocoa development, and they all have their niches. I just think that we can do a lot more to foster a good community than putting up links pages. The first thing we are planning is a dedicated mailing list to discuss Cocoa in wider contexts, including employment, collaboration, Open Source initiatives, training, support and assistance to new developers, and an action list of issues in order of priority. CocoaDev already has an issues page – the trick is to take this information and find some knowledgeable people willing to make position papers and post them for inspection, almost like RFCs.

Any comments or desires to help in this regard can be forwarded to BrentGulanowski.