Apfelsaft

This block is mostly about developing software for the Mac OS X and iPhone operating system. But you may also find personal things, which I find noteworthy. While spending my time developing, I often come across stumbling blocks, snags and pitfalls. If I find solutions or workarounds I usually only save them in my head, but this doesn’t help other developers who may have the same problems. And since I’m not 20 anymore, I sometimes get the feeling my brain is at its capacity and that I need some sort of external storage

If I find solutions for tricky or common problems or got other things of interest I’m going to post them here…

The Name

Apfelsaft is the german name for Apple-Juice and since this blog is mostly about software-development for Apple Operating-Systems I think it’s a good match.

About me

My name is Joachim, I’m 44 years old and I’m a developing software since the age of 14. Currently I’m living in Berlin the Capitol of Germany.

I started with a Commodore CBM 3008. It had a 1 MHz 6502 Microprocessor with 8 KB (Kilobyte!) RAM and a Cassette-Recorder as the “Hard-Disk”. Later on, I got a Floppy-Disk Drive with 170 KB capacity per Disk. First I did some Basic but I quickly moved to Assembler, since Basic was way to slow. I loved Carl Moser’s MAE (Macro Assembler Editor). I’ve worked with a number of different Operating-Systems but gladly I could always avoid developing for Windows. To be honest: I started one project on that platform, but found the API, the Tools and the Documentation so ugly and horrible that I quit after a short time. IBMs OS/2 was the System I spent most of my time with and I’m still loving it. After IBM dropped OS/2 I searched a while for an alternative and finally found Mac OS X. I never liked Linux too much on the Desktop. Before Mac OS X, I spend some time working with FreeBSD but at that time I didn’t know about Darwin and that it’s based on FreeBSD.

Because of my strong knowledge of the C (and C++) programming language and some knowledge of Smalltalk, I quickly became accustomed to Objective-C, Xcode, Cocoa and most of the Frameworks Mac OS X has to offer. I’ve also done, and still do, a lot of Java programming, but today I’m loving Objective-C the most. The only thing “I hate” about it, are the Square-Brackets. For me Objective-C is a perfect mixture of C, Smalltalk and Java. With Objective-C you can do low-level things as with C. You get the Object-Oriented paradigm of Smalltalk and the easiness of Java. Ok some may object that Java isn’t easy but compared to all the languages I’ve developed with, Java was the easiest so far.

Whom you’re dealing with