Actual Cocoa Development

Back in graduate school we had two Macs in the lab. One Mac was fast (for 1993); the other had a CD drive. I wanted to use the fast one, but I also wanted to listen to my small CD collection. So I did what any geekish sort does, I wrote an AppleScript extension, audioCDgh, which allowed me to write short scripts to start the CD playing. That was sort of OK, but not very Mac-like running little scripts when a GUI application was possible. So I wrote my first C++ application, Remote Remote GH, which worked quite well, and started me on over a decade of semi-steady work writing C++ applications.


Well, version 0.19 of MythTV can be controlled via telnet with simple text commands, and I quickly decided it would be very cool to renovate the Remote Remote GH brand with a MythTV edition. So, my nights and weekends have been filled with glorious Cocoa development. Not the trudgery of making a living C++, but honest to goodness, delightfully simple and powerful Objective-C; it's been wonderful and reminded me of why I left chemistry for computers so long ago.


And I'm close to being done. Just this afternoon, I got the TCP socket code working, and have been sending keystrokes to the MythTV box on my local network; it's still very rough, but all the hard stuff is behind me, and just polish and completeness ahead of me. Look for it in a couple weeks.

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I've written numerous multimedia controllers over the years, and the one thing I think people miss is that real CD players have buttons for play, stop, fast forward, etc. because they have no alternative; they are limited by their physicality. Computers are less limited. Therefore, RRgh for MythTV will have no such buttons, users will type to send the same commands you would from the Linux keyboard, or double click tables, or navigate via a popup menu; all things a physical CD player's designer could only imagine. Which is a partial shame, as I became quite good at designing play button icons.