Are there any magazines available that focus on Cocoa development? The REALBasic world will soon have a magazine called REALBasic Developer that will commence publication in July 2002. See: http://www.rbdeveloper.com/
I would subscribe right now to something similar for Cocoa development if it was available. I’ve taken a look at MacTech magazine a few times over the past 18 months, but it seems like most of their content is still focused on OS 9 development. (I’ll admit I haven’t looked at MacTech again for about four months, so maybe they’ve changed and I’m not aware of it). - K. McClanahan
I don’t think there’s anything currently, but if I had money, I’d subscribe (as long as it was more than, say, the magazine equivalent of Learning Cocoa). Maybe CocoaDev should put it to Imagine Media or something :)
– RobRix
I’ve got the money and I’d subscribe to a Cocoa Mag right this instant! Where do I get it? I’ve already purchased every Cocoa Book that’s been published to date. The best is Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. Next would be Learning Cocoa (a distant next), and lastly the Mac OS X Developer’s Guide. Actually, the Learning Cocoa book isn’t so bad if you read the Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X first!!! But don’t read Learning Cocoa first or else you’ll be scratching your head raw. Yeah that’s it. –Rawwwww. Raw as in sushi. Uncooked fish raw. Yep. Got it?
Perhaps a group of us should start one, or something.
– FinlayDobbie
Some kind of e-zine could be easily done (I’d write some articles with my limited ability), but I think that CocoaDev is fine for most of these purposes. (Isn’t there an Articles seciton…?)
[ update: check out CocoaDevMagazine ]
Creating a CocoaDevMagazine section to this site is slightly off point. What I originally asked above was if anyone knew of a “printed” and “published” periodical that focused on Cocoa development. Please don’t take this as a slam against the effort and spirit that Sam put into creating a CocoaDevMagazine E-Zine, but there’s not really any difference between that section and the rest of this website. Sometimes it is nice to have “offline” materials at your disposal. I mean, it’s difficult to sit on the can with your PowerBook while you take care of your morning business…
Does anyone here subscribe to MacTech magazine? Have they changed their focus from CW and OS 9 to Cocoa and OS X yet? Last time I checked they really hadn’t.
—> K. McClanahan
Not having actually seen MacTech in ages, I can’t say for sure. But I’d like to chime in and say “printed is better”; I use an iMac, I can’t lug it around anywhere, and the value of having something you can actually sit and leaf through is not to be underestimated.
I think a problem with such a magazine might be writing it so that it’s relevant to a large enough group of people. It’d have to cover just about every Cocoa developer out there in order to get a large enough subscriber base, and that includes the ones who just put in the Dev Tools CD and installed it because they thought they might like to learn about it.
This sort of magazine would have to offer information that’s pertinent to absolute beginners but it couldn’t leave out folks who actually wrote articles for StepWise either. It’d have to cover things beyond Cocoa development; new user interface concepts, application design philosophies, all sorts of design aspects so that it could be interesting to those who already know what they’re doing and at the same time useful to those who don’t.
Another difficulty is getting writers who not only know what they’re talking about but are also skilled at writing (and this is not a slam of the many good-hearted people who contribute to this site, but writing is a skill as much as programming is; some folks got it, and some folks don’t).
I don’t think that this is an altogether impossible goal. I do, however, think that securing a publisher might not be easy. That said, if the CocoaDev community was interested in creating such a beast and could come up with a publisher, they’d have a writer and designer in me, if that proved useful.
To recap: code samples and tutorials aren’t enough. Code scraps are better posted on a website unless they’re short, because programmers are lazy and would rather copy and paste. Tutorials are great, but they’re only relevant to the segment of the reader base that doesn’t already know the stuff. And there’s also the question of why you’d buy a magazine when you can get all its content online free and print it if you need hardcopy? Our hypothetical CocoaDeveloperMagazine would have to provide more.
What does everyone think? Am I barmy, or is this something we might actually be able to accomplish with a publisher and some effort?
– RobRix
Other benefits to printed magazines are the advertisements. It’s nice to see what others are doing and what services/products are available.
Definitely! A magazine for a community such as this should serve the community in several ways, and that sort of a thing would be one of them. It’d also give every Cocoa/tool developer a place to advertise their wares to the community. Definitely a good thing.
– RobRix
Mactech: for those who went to WWDC 2002 and went into the Internet Cafe, Mactech was giving away free copies, featuring at least one Cocoa article, by Bill Cheeseman (I think there were actually a couple more, too, by other authors). I really think that they will be more than enough Mac programming magazine for the moment. There’s only so much advertising dollars to go around. They could easily add more pages without adding a lot of cost.
I personally think that the current state of Mac OS programming resources could benefit from more consolidation, not more divergence. There’s a lot of web sites and a lot of people working on different things. Some of it is complementary, some of it is redundant, but it’s not at all straightforward to find the answer to a question even if it’s already out there in two or three different places. I’d like more Cocoa design articles (you know, patterns and such), and I’d love a good Cocoa-centric magazine, but I suspect that the effort put into that would involve sucking energy away from somewhere else, like CocoaDev, CocoaDevCentral, or Stepwise. I’d be happy if there was one prominent (non-Apple) website (and one prominent magazine) for Mac development, or at least some more co-ordination between the ones that exist already. I don’t see a big problem with Carbon, Cocoa, Quicktime and OpenGL living under the same roof – even WebObjects and AppleScript, too. It’s in all Mac developers’ interests to know something of all of these technologies. I’d really like if MacTech was less expensive and had a much bigger readership, because then it would attract the best articles and be better for everyone.
– BrentGulanowski
I would love to see more Cocoa articles in MacTech. I really feel the the magazine has become virtually useless in the past few years. It averages about one article that I find relevant per 12 issues. I subscribed for three years thinking that the OS X content would really pick up, but it hasn’t. All those considering a separate Cocoa magazine should first attempt to submit good articles to MacTech and see if it can be made to turn around.
– ChrisParrish
That’s MacTech’s normal mode, dude. It’s virtually useless once you’re no longer a complete novice. Always has been. It picked up a bit in the late nineties when it started getting content that had been destined for Apple’s superb “develop” magazine, which was axed by Jobs. But that content ran out quickly.
MacTech has been getting more X-savvy. Andrew Stone contributes Cocoa stuff regularly, as do I. And if more Cocoa developers out there were to contribute articles, I’m sure it would become even more cocoafied!
What’s cool is that they actually pay you for your printed articles! So check out the author’s kit at the MacTech web site, and submit more Cocoa/Mac OS X stuff, already! :-)
– Dan Wood
But MacTech is still a wonderful source for home automation technology.
– JimCath
The internet killed the magazines, for me at least. Now they are months behind… everything is available on the net. Although I like to have programming tips and articles in printed form (and that’s preferably not laser-printed…), I’m not that keen on buying something that I can have for free, and contribute to (like CocoaDev!)
– TheoHultberg/Iconara
The internet only killed computer news magazines. It didn’t kill useful magazines that contain sections of useful “How-To’s”. Most of the how-to information is good for some period of time after the article is published and arrives in your real-life mailbox. Besides that, you just wait and see… –many (but not all!) of the free resources we all got used to during the DOTCOM era will eventually fold up and disappear, justto be replaced by similar (and sometimes inferior) “pay-for” services. It’s only a matter of time.
– K. McClanahan
I’m pretty sure I agree with K. McClanahan here. If I’m going to pay for something I want to be able to have my hands on it; subscription websites hold very little attraction for me.
There is really no reason why you can’t have both (published and ezine). I am seeing more and more magazines being published with the option for PDF, hardcopy, or both. And with a printable PDF, you have the best of both worlds in a slightly less polished but much less expensive, product.