The bulk of my experience comes from ActionScript programming from Flash 5 to Flash 7. I’ve grown with it steadily, developing web applications in a previous job. From there I picked up on open source technologies, php, python, ruby and even an occasional dabbling in C# just to finish a project someone else had left.
I don’t know Objective-C but I have this project in my mind that’s consuming me ever since I got the idea for it. Anti-Theft security software. I first got the idea years ago when I read of a story of a guy who was able to get his stolen macbook back because an AppleScript he had written would periodically “phone home” whenever it’s connected to the net.
There were tools I found on the net, Undercover, iAlertU, but they were lacking the features I want one way or another. Undercover was good but it’s not for free. Macs costs a lot, additional expense for a software that is not even guaranteed to work in local settings would be too impractical. iAlertU was free, but it’s focus was on getting attention. What I need was something that would do it’s job discreetly. And the idea for a project was born.
The Plan
The idea was simple enough to pass on to. Take control of the isignt camera, grab a picture, save it to the filesystem and use the networking object to send it to a pre-specified email. And do all of the above in the background. Hmm… I think I can do that! One thing about Object Oriented Programming I learned is that it’s supposed to make programming easy. Every functionality you can do with the Operating System, they’re all grouped in their own objects… organized according to its logical purpose. For example, when you want to read or write files, you’ll probably have to deal with the File System object. Now this may be named differently across operating systems but the purpose is the same [update:for OS X it's named NSFileManager]. And if my very simplistic program logic above is to be used… it seems I’ll only need to deal with 3 objects to accomplish my task: one for dealing with the isight hardware, 1 for the filesystem, and one for networking tasks. But then again… everything is all simple in theory.
The Tools
I subscribe to the belief that for a program to take advantage of the operating system’s full power, it has to be written in the native language. And for OS X, that would mean using the cocoa framework and Objective-C language. I don’t know it yet, so I’ll have to learn as I go along. And by the time I’m done with this project, who knows, maybe I could know well enough to earn a few bucks out of it 