On Tuesday of this week, I traded my no-longer-used Dell Axim PDA for an iBook G4. I owned a Mac Toaster Model back in 1988, but that was a completely different beast. Even though this new Mac is a few years old, and only 800Mhz, it’s amazingly snappy. I have a desktop machine with an Athlon 1.4Ghz chip running XP, and this little Mac feels faster than that. Maybe it’s just because it’s different, but it really does feel that way. I’m very happy with it so far. I have installed a ton of software and have gotten it configured just so. I have my full Java development environment setup (Eclipse, Ant, SmartCVS and SQuirrelSQL) and I can build my company’s software, which is very cool.

Tonight I had a little spare time and started looking into Cocoa development. I knew that the Mac used Objective-C as it’s main development language, but I had never before had the desire to probe Objective-C. As I started looking into it, what do I find? Smalltalk-style calling semantics. I was shocked. I never knew that Obj-C had essentially grafted Smalltalk-style message passing onto the C language. What a surprise. This may end up being quite a bit of fun!

I’m currently just looking online, but I will very shortly want a dead tree to delve further into Cocoa. Any recommendations?