It’s been close to 9 months since I picked my 24″ iMac. Despite the initial scare (yes it was bizarre!), things have turned out to be great. Being a dyed-in-the-wool Windows user, I did tinker with Windows Vista inside Bootcamp but there was something alluring about Leopard (aka Mac OS 10.5) which kept pulling me back. Having mastered the OS for daily tasks, and having overcome the muscle memory of 8+12+ (I am older than I thought) years of Windows usage (from Windows 3.11 all the way to Windows Vista), I decided to tackle the next frontier – developing for the Mac.
After several attempts at using cross-platform frameworks (wxWidgets, Mono, GTK) with unsatisfactory results, I started exploring the native Mac development platform. The biggest hurdle here was Objective C. For someone who is coming from a C#/VB.NET/C++ background (with good exposure to PERL/Javascript thrown in), the syntax stumped me. Then I came across Aaron Hillegass’s brilliant Cocoa Programming book some 3 weeks ago, and it has been a smooth sailing ever since. It reminds me so much of my days in college spent learning Win32 and MFC programming.
Today I came up with a small app which I thought I’d share. This builds on the SpeakLine example presented in Aaron’s book. Instead of using a Text Field to take a string from the user, it uses the sample text which comes with each voice profile on the Mac, and says it when you click the Speak button:
The sample text for a lot of voices is hilarious (just like the voices themselves). It is one of the many small things that add up towards making Macs a fun, playful platform.