Programming

To answer a question I posed myself earlier on here: Chuck doesn't want the book to go very deep into Mac OS X programming. There will be a chapter all about software development, but it won't contain a complete reference to Objective-C, or anything like that. It will instead examine the whole developer's toolbox in varying levels of detail (things like Project Builder, the big IDE, will receive much more attention than Pixie, the magnifying glass utility).

I look forward to the chance of writing my own "Getting Started with OS X programming" section, since I haven't found anything in any format that clearly states what you need to learn before you can dive into the Cocoa API or whatnot -- I've been picking this up instead through inference and interviewing friends with more experience here than me.

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Linda would have separated the above sentence into two, splitting it at the emdash. She'd call it a run-on sentence, a label with which I don't agree; I learned run-ons as independent clauses incorrectly joined, such as "This is a run-on, it has no coordinating conjunction." But she does mean it to say that, stylistically, it runs on and on and on. I say in my defense that I picked up my penchant for ungodly long sentences from the best writing course I have ever taken, taught by a prof who made you fight with tooth and nail for any paper grade higher than 'D'. He loved and rewarded using the active voice as much as possible, and he felt similarly about sentences possessing a sinister and labyrinthine nature. Having dependence on weak verbs knocked out of me undoubtedly proved a Good Thing, but perhaps I should question that other effect.

Candy

Is there, or was there ever, such a thing as Mexican Stoplight Candy? Google refers me only to people making references to the same MST3K episode I picked up the phrase from.

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I'm falling a little more into the Baldur's Gate groove. Each major misfeature I do far find seems to balance itself out with a major nicefeature, at least relative to console RPGs. I was, for example, feeling somewhat annoyed at the RTS-style movement (select units, then click on where they should go) that felt far more herky-jerky that console game movement, where your heroes keep moving west so long as you held down the left controller button. This makes movement through wilderness areas very slow, and I was dreading the thought of backtracking, where it would take fifteen minutes or more of real time to get my guys between cities on the map, while I click-scroll-clicked them up paths through the forest. But: a discovery! After your group leaves an area, you can insta-zap them to any other place in the game world that they've already visited, and the game just advances the game-clock by the appropriate amount. So that's pretty good. I definitely prefer this over the console mechanic of having 32 fights with Monster A or Monster B each time you step outside.

Of course, the reason that console RPGs set you up with all those fights is to massively level-up your characters so that they can topple the next boss monster. You can see another bit of difference with Baldur's Gate in that I've been playing for four nights and have gotten two characters (out of six) up to level 2. According to a FAQ I read, the game only supports characters up to level 6, so I'm really not worried.