Being a bit of a Mac-head and programmer to boot I've taken various looks at writing native Mac OS X apps withe XCode (the IDE), Cocoa (the frameworks), and Objective-C (the language). In general I've come away relatively happy with the toolset. But I must admit, I've filed my own share of enhancement requests with Apple. The top of my list was refactoring support in the IDE. I know it probably sounds lame to the hard core coders but after developing with Java for so long I just expect it and perhaps more embarassingly I feel I need it. Global regex search and replace just doesn't cut it. Secondly, I dislike all the boiler-plate "noise" that appears in your code to declare properties (instance var & accessor/mutator methods) and all the manual memory management.
Well Apple's been looking around at the competition and listening to feedback and judging by their website (here and here) and a few message boards (like this one), Apple has a lot in store for developers. Objective-C 2.0 sports Garbage Collection for the first time, some syntactical sugar for iterating over collections, and a nice simple way of declaring properties. XCode provides refactoring (YAY!) and more enhancements to keep your eyeballs on the code while editing and debugging. And even Interface Builder got cleaned up a bit and exposes nice simple ways of using core animation in Leopard. I'm looking forward to seeing it all in action.
BTW: I read on the RubyCocoa mailing list a few months ago that it might be bundled with Leopard too. Writing Mac OS X apps with Ruby... very cool... Have to wait and see if that one happens.
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