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Hello all
http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=461		 Page 1 of 1
Author:  MartinW [ Tue Mar 16, 2010 2:05 am ]
Post subject:  Hello all
Well, I didn't really read this particular section to be a general 'hello' section but that seems to be the thing so I'll join in.

I was prodded in the direction of the retro software site after talking to someone earlier, which basically came about while ordering Zap and The Krystal Connection. I've looked plenty of times in the past but it's been a longing, loving look at Swift, and then I've been forced to move on as it's not available for my weapon of choice (Mac). Ok, so I could reboot into Windows 7 but that just feels wrong!

I've been a Windows developer for 21 years now and last year treated myself to a BBC B from Retroclinic for my birthday. 'Back in the day' I had a ZX81, then a Dragon 32, then an Amstrad CPC-464. But the beeb was always the one I _WOULD_ have had if money had been no object. So when I discovered Mark selling lovely shiny ones with IDE drives I decided I'd waited long enough :lol:

So, these days I don't actually do much coding for work, but in the past I've done VB, C, C#, Java, a touch of PHP and for my own amusement, a little PIC Assembler. In what little spare time I get, I'm currently working on a small Acorn based project for OS X as a familiarisation task for both Objective C / Cocoa and also the Acorn world. Nothing desperately exciting just some utilities and it's been nearly a year in the making now so we could all be very old by the time I release anything! Saying that though, I need the tools badly myself now, it's holding me up for other things, so it's full steam ahead!

Acorn wise, dunno really. I'm mainly using a Master (sorry Electron guys). I have a fairly intimate knowledge of Asteroids since I own both an Asteroids cab and an Asteroids Deluxe cab, plus I've fixed dozens of the PCBs for people but hey, let's learn to crawl first eh?

So, enough waffling from me :)

Oh, booked in for VCF in June incidentally!

Martin.
Author:  DaveJ [ Tue Mar 16, 2010 4:59 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Hello all
Welcome to the forum Martin - it's nice to have someone else here from Somerset.
Author:  Samwise [ Tue Mar 16, 2010 4:04 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Hello all
Hi, Martin.

No idea whether he got any further with it, but SteveO was floating the idea at one point of moving from Delphi to FreePascal to make SWIFT cross-platform.

Always interesting to hear about new tools - we'd love to host or just link to them from our wiki, if they'd be of use to anyone for Acorn development. Would they be open sourced? Just wondering whether there's any scope for ports to other platforms (which is what happened with Rich's GPL'd BeebAsm).

Good to have you on board, anyway!

Sam.
Author:  MartinW [ Tue Mar 16, 2010 8:19 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Hello all
Don't get excited over what I'm up to! "Tools" is probably too grand a word for it, and unfortunately, we're talking about a plugin to technology in Leopard / Snow Leopard so I don't think it'll ever be cross platform. I use the phrase "Tools" really because I'm coding the underlying api as a framework so when (if) it actually gets released then I can produce a quick document and anyone could make use of it however they wish - if they wish, of course!

As far as open source / closed source goes, at the moment it's closed. But for no sinister reason.

When it's done I'll open source it as long as the code isn't too much of an embarrassment, but I don't want to do so until it's done, otherwise someone, with all the good intentions in the world will add code and work on it and before I know it, it's finished and I've not achieved my goal of teaching myself to code on the Mac :lol:

That's all there is to it really at the moment. Then I'll look at moving onto coding on the beeb itself. When the weathers warmer and I can set a workbench up in my office.
Author:  DaveF [ Wed Mar 17, 2010 1:10 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Hello all
Hi Martin

MartinW wrote:
I'm currently working on a small Acorn based project for OS X as a familiarisation task for both Objective C / Cocoa and also the Acorn world.

Interesting - I'm a Mac user myself - I quite warmed to Cocoa and Objective C after doing some on the iPhone.

It's possible to develop on the Beeb on your Mac using simply BeebASM and your text editor of choice (mine is Emacs for assembler).

Hope to see you at VCF :)
Author:  MartinW [ Wed Mar 17, 2010 1:19 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Hello all
I happen to be online, so I'll respond straight away :)

I love the whole development environment on the Mac. I think XCode etc. is lovely but I never cease to be taken back with Cocoa / ObjC.

As an example, I spent hours last night reading a disk title from an image's catalogue. The three lines or so of code that I ended up with works fine but is absolutely hideous.

The amount of effort to read 8 bytes from one NSMutableData object, four bytes from another, stitch them together into a new NSMutableString, remove any NULLs from the string and ultimately return the result to the caller was mind boggling. Ok, so now that I read through all of that, the fact it can be done in (counts them) 4 lines of code doesn't sound too bad!

But next I want to retrieve an NSInteger from the NSMutableData object and I can't find any documentation on how.

I just know that when I look at it tonight I'm going to just drop down into pure C and start working with raw byte buffers. It's going to be a darn site easier on the brain but just feels like a *FAIL* somewhere along the line. Surely it shouldn't be this hard!!

Anyway, sorry, getting OT :)

Martin.
Author:  SteveO [ Wed Mar 17, 2010 3:40 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Hello all
Hi and welcome,

Yes, I'd love Swift to be on Mac and Linux, and perhaps one day it will be. When I quickly dappled into FreePascal and tried (briefly) to convert some much simpler stuff there seemed to be a lot of things that would need looking at, and that was for a much simpler project. Time to spend doing it just wasn't/ isn't there at present. I will look at FreePascal / Lazarus again to see if there have been improvements in support for some of the units I use. If there is converting wouldn't be such a pain.
Author:  DaveF [ Wed Mar 17, 2010 6:17 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Hello all
MartinW wrote:
Surely it shouldn't be this hard!!

It just takes a bit of getting used to, that's all. And I believe the iPhone libraries are cut down versions of the full blown OS X jobs so I'd had it easier.

Not as nice as .NET though, but hey - variety is the spice of life. That's why I do a bit of 6502 now and again too :)
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