A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I wanted to write a Mac app in Cocoa and I was soliciting advice. Dwight Shih, my iBook’s original owner (it’s running great!), says that I write something for myself and not for others. I’d have to agree and here’s what I have in mind:

I need an easy app to start with so it’s going to be an adding machine. For the “younger” folks out there, adding machines were like calculators, but the generally did the four big operations: add, subtract, multiply and divide. I’m picking those four to work on because the functions are easy to program in C and the concept leaves plenty of room to grow. Also, with an adding machine interface, I can grow to a custom window type, “tapes” that you tear off and save as documents, preferences for the look and feel and more. The way I see it, this concept will help me focus on Cocoa fundamentals first instead of C functions and object-oriented concepts.