As threatened, newbie Mac questions

[fivemack]

1. Is there a sensible way of resizing a window whose resize handle is under the Dock?


2. Could someone point me at an XCode tutorial? I'm at the trial-and-error stage, and I can't even understand the error messages


3. Are Python-to-Cocoa bindings available, and adequate to write applications which look reasonable?


4. If I'm missing Excel, and find gnumeric from fink hopelessly ugly, kludgy and incompatible, is there any better move than picking up Office X? I don't need anything more than Excel97 gave me on Windows, but I feel I want at least that. For word-processing, I'm reasonably happy with TextEdit - I don't need more than a couple of styles and spell-check


5. I take several thousand photos a year, at 2.5MB each with my new camera, and my archive is 10,000 or so images. Picasa coped nicely on the PC; will iPhoto?


6. Where can I get a 'macish' (IE small, square and white) USB hub? Palm, compact-flash reader, Webcam, mouse and keyboard have used up all my ports


7. Is there a way to get fvwm2-under-XDarwin (or, if you prefer, some other window manager under some other X server) to do solid window drag and resize? Currently I don't even get an outline box; with twm I got no feedback, with fvwm I get a teeny little box with coordinates in.
   

Comments

[emperor]

re 3:

They rather assume you've used Application Builder to sort out a lot of the GUI-ish bits of your application. YMMV as to whether this is a good thing or not.

[simont]

(DYM Interface Builder?)

I've recently been learning Cocoa using Objective-C, and although it took some thought, I did figure out how to avoid Interface Builder totally and build an application using no nibs at all and nothing but ordinary code. I've been arguing about this on Mono with more conventional OS X programmers, but they haven't yet said anything to make me change my mind... Don't know whether the same trick would work with the Python bindings, but I for one would be strongly inclined to try it if I were using Python.

fivemack: I found the Cocoa documentation supplied with the Xcode tools (start at /Developer/Documentation/Cocoa/index.html) to be basically adequate, or at least nothing I couldn't work with when supplemented with a bit of Googling.

It isn't entirely clear whether you're happy to try ObjC or whether you non-negotiably want to use Python, but if the former then I just read the ObjC introduction starting at /Developer/Documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjectiveC/index.html and that sorted out most of my essential language-level confusion, leaving me in a good position to learn the APIs.

[emperor]

yes, I did. oops.

Unfortunately, the python-cocoa documentation assumes you'll be using nibs, so starting off not knowing the bindings OR anything about cocoa proved to be rather a stumbling-block (but I have little time and brain ATM)