John Franklin's blog

If you’ve seen one job fair in this area, you’ve seen them all. Rooms full of tables with flyers and smiling people in suits or matching polo shirts standing around them, hundreds or thousands of people showing up handing out resumes like it’s Halloween for HR, getting business cards in return.

After a while you start to see the same people handing out the same resume or trying to recruit for the same jobs. There’s got to be another way...

Yesterday was the day here in the United States when we do the semiannual changing of the clocks.

My computer has been able to change its own time since at least as far back as when I started college in 1990. In the twenty years since then, intelligent time support in other consumer electronics has increased leaps and bounds. I’m sure of it. After all, since then the internet has sped communications world wide, processing power has increased over 100 fold, and the open source movement has given us a vast library of free software. How hard can it be?

Let me make it clear I don’t think I have very high standards in this regard. It is not like wondering where my jet pack is, or my flying car. What I’m looking for is the ability for a device to understand daylight savings time and adjust itself twice a year. I’m not even looking for the device to synchronize its clock with an external source, which should also be a no-brainer in this day and age.

So, let’s run the list.

If you are familiar with object-oriented programming, then you'll find Obejctive-C classes to be an easy concept to grasp. Each language has a different way of handling objects and object classes, any particular language may not support all features, but the base concepts are all similar.

The first thing you need is to set up your build environment. For most of these examples, you can use any OS that supports GCC. If you're running on Mac OS X, install the development tools and you're done. For Ubuntu or Fedora, install the appropriate compiler packages and any dependencies. On Ubuntu, the build-essential package works well. For Fedora, install the Developer Tools grouplist and the gcc-objc package.

You'll also need the Foundation framework libraries and headers. Ubuntu keeps these in the libgnustep-base and libgnustep-base-dev packages. Fedora calls it gnustep-base-devel. Fedora also requires the gcc-objc package on top of the Developers Tools grouplist.

If you already know 'C', then you have a good basis for Objective-C. As the name implies, Objective-C is an extension of C, much like C++ is. Here is our first example source file example1.m:

I'm going to be presenting an iPhone programming demonstration at the November 2009 NoVaLUG meeting. Yes, I know that this is a Linux Users Group, and there's not much open source about the iPhone, but it does derive from some open source material: OpenStep, which lives on today as GNUStep. Now, gentle reader, I know what you're thinking. "If GNUStep is the current open source version of OpenStep, why don't you demo development with GNUStep?