Errata for Cocoa Programming

#39012: The description of the process of building SimpleBrowser omits changing the Window title to SimpleBrowser and changing NewApplication to SimpleBrowser. This is fairly intuitive but perhaps a note to the effect that it is either covered later or left to the reader's intuition is called for.--Peter W A Wood

#38688: Daniel,

I'm not sure where you could place an expanded version of your explanation of Actions/Targets/Outlets, but I am sure that a more complete explanation of some key Objective-C underpinnings would be very useful up front in your book. Introducing NSControl would also be useful.

Hillegass spreads out these CONCEPTS in short sections early in his book,
on pages 62-63 for messaging, SEL and obj_msgSend(),
on pages 79-80 for controls and their target, action and sender, and
on page 90 for setting the target programatically.

It is also VERY important to continually illustrate that while some powerful results can be easily obtained working solely in Interface Builder, those same results can be obtained and sometimes MUST by directly coding in Xcode.
Also, really understanding up front what NSObject can do would be a big learning help for a beginner.

How can your control-drag between
objects in IB be duplicated in Xcode?

NSOject protocols?
[target performSelector: @selector (buttonClicked:)
withObject: self ]

And a little about the compiler would be useful.

What do IBOutlet and IBAction "hints" do under the covers?

Hillegass is pretty good at getting this basic stuff in early.
You need to do the same.

Thanks in advance for any changes you might make along these lines.
Thank you very much for your wonderful book.
I am loving it!

SteveJ--Stephen C. Johnson

#39454: First: Great Book. Now: Chpt 9 (Custom Views). In this chapter you walk the reader through creating a custom view. I think it might help the book to take a paragraph or so to explain WHY A CUSTOM VIEW IS USED in more detail. In general, it might help readers to better understand the circumstances when a coder might want to consider a custom view approach (Chpt 9) over another approach (i.e., that used in Chpt 8). Pros/Cons of the Chpt 8 approach vs. the Chpt 9 Custom Views approach might help new programers understand which approach to use when planning their own applications. Just a paragraph or two at the very start of the Chpt 9 would be helpful.--David Stanley

#39774: When I run Hello Application, if I launch or terminate one application I get something that looks like the book. If I launch or terminate two applications consecutively then I get a red or green box around the icon. (well three sides of the box, the right side is left blank).--Joseph Gravelle

#39527: "If you look at MainMenu.xib you’ll see that the “File’s Owner” is also given as NSApplication.".
The reader is in the Info.plist and might not notice that you mean you have to switch to Interface Builder and check the class indentity of File's Owner there.--Peter Lorent

#38841: Instead of "Go back to the code as it was in Section 12.6" (and similar suggestions in earlier chapters where you show 2 ways of approaching a problem), perhaps introducing the Xcode snapshot functionality would be useful. It might be a lot easier than a big undo/re-edit cycle (just revert to an earlier snapshot).--Pierce Hickey

#38944: This is your first use of "@class" in a header file - without any explanation. As a result the implementation class of "MyBookshelf.m" needs to #import "PragBook.h" (not mentioned in the text). Is there a reason for this forward declaration vs. #import approach?

--Pierce Hickey

#39586: Changes in the awakeFromNib are missing. You would have to consult the supplied source code to see the changes. It should be mentioned to remove the convertDictionaryToProperties, convertPropertiesToDictionary and createATempBookFrom methods.--Peter Lorent

#39349: You should probably mention that the Class of the PragBook Model Entity needs to be changed to the new "PragBook" class instead of the default "NSManaged".
It took me a while to discover why my class wasn't being called without this change (only worked it out via the source code).--Pierce Hickey