Introducing iQuip 1.0
I hate Objective C but I can't stay away. I put together a little Preference Pane for the Mac that puts a random quote in your login window. It's basically a pretty wrapper around the old fortune program.
You can get it here. Lemme know if it works for you.
Props to thenopp and especially Ralf for helping me track down some bugs.
In leopard you'll get GC in the Obj-C runtime which will make it much more palatable.
Yeah, but even assuming they get a performant gc implementation in place, I dunno how much it's really going to matter. Memory management is actually not that high on my list of gripes.
In practice, it just seems like the places where you actually need to explicitly retain/release are relatively few and far between. The autorelease mechanism feels kludgy but it seems to work pretty well. And its almost a non-issue if you do your model in Core Data (which, along with Interface Builder is one of the really really pleasant part of Mac development).
Much higher than memory management on my gripes list are:
* Poor-to-middling IDE, modulo CD and IB
* I can write code that crashes again
* Debugging
* ObjC language is inherently too verbose for me
* Verbose language/APIs + limited/no code completion = pain
* Limited/no type safety
* Inconsistent docs (overview docs are excellent, but the reference docs can be a little light on detail).
* Inconsistent APIs
* Inconsistent/surprising behaviors