Should I start with the Text Editor example?
 

Hi,

I'm hoping you can give me some newbie advice. I am an experienced developer, but have very little Cocoa experience. I have done some iPhone app prototyping and have some of the basic concepts down.

I was just poking around the Text Editor example you posted. When trying it out, I see a lot of glitches, poor arrow key behavior, etc - as you said, the editing bit is a little rough :)

As a Cocoa Touch newbie, who's interested in writing a syntax-highliting editor, do you think that trying to bring your editor up to speed and adding the features (remote syncing, syntax highlighting, etc.) to it is a good direction to go in? Or, would I be better starting from scratch with a codebase I write and, of course, understand?

One of the reasons I ask this is that Apple's sample code is generally only good for demonstrating a specific feature. The rest of the program structure is the minimum needed to make the thing function. (As an example, a multi-page app dynamically generated views on the fly with "Page X" strings. Not the way you'd actually write an app, so if you wanted to turn that example into an app you'd have to write lots of structure around it)

So, one of my questions I guess is: Do you think the Text Editor is written as a real app would be written, and is a good starting point for an app that does a superset of what it does? Or is it more like demo code, useful to demonstrate features as you write your own app?

Thanks.

I realized that my question was a bit rambling and verbose.

What I'd like to know is, if I wish to write a text editor, is the OmniFrameworks example either:
A) likely a good starting point - a reasonably well written beginning to an app, albeit with bugs
Or,
B) Demo code, useful to look at features of the Omni frameworks, but not really structured under the hood as a real app would be.

Thanks!

I think the example app is a reasonable start, though it obviously has a long way to go. If it seems at all close to what you're wanting to do, I guess I'd start with it.

Thanks, Ken, I appreciate the info.

My goal is a syntax-highliting text editor for iPad, with remote sync to a UN*X back end. I've tried most of the iPad text editor type apps on the app store, and some are close, but none are close enough. I will eventually try to add some fancier features such as feeding the text into a syntax checker, and adding in-line error display - so a CoreText enginer underneath is probably a good starting point.

I will most likely release the app under an open source license, and hopefully get enough interest from fellow developers to keep features coming in. I am honestly surprised at how little there is in this area for the iPad now.

gopi

Yes I believe so, the TextEditor is the most complete of the samples available in the "open" frameworks (for iPhone and iPad of course). But I wouldn't discount Scaling and other samples. It all depends on what you are attempting to do of course. In my case, I needed a document gallery (for images primarily) and a framework to edit them, so TextEditor (even though I mainly deal with photos) was ideal. In the end, the supporting frameworks Base, Foundation, Quartz etc... are the real gems that are worth discovering. Have fun.