Lately I’ve subconsciously felt unable to code for Mac, mostly because my previous attempts to learn Xcode and Cocoa have failed spectacularly. So today I decided to really go at it and see if I could make some progress. And I did! Not much, but it was there. :) It didn’t take too long before I realized that iDiary is still too complicated for me to start with, so I decided to write a program that reads a GEDCOM file and displays statistics on it (how many individuals, marriages, etc.). After an hour or so, I’ve figured out how to open a file and get the file size in bytes, but that’s about it. My head hurts and I’m going to call it a night. (I’ve had a headache all evening — it’s not from Cocoa. :)) Xcode and Cocoa really are difficult, but thousands of developers have learned it all and I can too. I don’t care how hard it is; I’m doing this. And just imagine how good I’ll feel when I finally do conquer it. Mmm… :)

Today I also started looking at the GEDCOM file format. (Right now I’ve just got a sample file that I downloaded from FamilySearch, but later I’ll get the actual spec.) It doesn’t seem too complicated. Indenting my sample file made the hierarchy much easier to conceptualize, by the way. Anyway, this week (hopefully tomorrow) I’ll get my program to read the GEDCOM file into an intelligible internal data format, give statistics, and then write it out as an XML file. I figure it’s better to learn all this “internal” stuff first and then focus on figuring out the GUI stuff (bindings, outlets, actions, etc.).

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