I haven’t developed any software that interacts with OSX before the last couple of days. I have to say the experience has been interesting. I’m really impressed with the usability of the interface builder as well as the power of the .NIB file. I hadn’t realized it was much more than just a description of the application layout.
The main reason I’ve never ventured into programming for OSX is Objective-c. Don’t know it, not sure if I want to know more than I’ve learned in the last couple of days. I had an idea of a project to leverage the SyncServices engine though – so I took the plunge. Into PyObjC that is. (I would have liked to use RubyCocoa but it doesn’t look nearly as fully baked).
Progress was slow at first; I had to at least learn to read Objective-C so that I could understand the docs and the example sync applications. Now that I’ve figured out some of the issues I’ve encountered I’m much more confident – if nothing else now I know what I don’t know. I have to say I’m really impressed with the power of PyObjc. It’s been really great for interactively groping my way through the SyncServices apis.
My first task was to get a feel for the apis by doing a read-only (pull) sync of the stickies saved in Apple’s Stickie’s Example. The code that does that is here. There’s currently no sample python code for the SyncServices module available, so I should hand this off to the pyobjc folks (If they’ll take my painfully un-idiomatic python) once I flesh it out some more.
One thought on “Some experiments with PyObjC and the Mac OSX SyncServices engine”