[kisol007]

First let me say I am not a programmer at all and have never programed. And the application I would like to build is just for me and I can take as long as I need to build it.

What I would like to do is build a sort of text editing application; basically I would import some test (like a book) and then I would want to "write" notes in a margin area and "mark up" the actual text--highlighting words, phrases, etc.

Pretty simple. Maybe it exists but I haven't found it...

Anyway, I want some informed advice; should I try to build this thing by learning C/ Objective-C/ Cocoa with Xcode or would some other approach be better for me... like say REALbasic or something.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Again, I don't mind taking the time to learn C, etc... so don't worry about that. This is a sort of "personal development" goal anyway...

Thanks.

[larkost]

As to programs that do this: Microsoft Word would be the first on e to come to mind. There is quite a lot of this in their versioning system. It is setup to allow for editors to comment on the documents, or for multiple people to create a document together (not at the same time though).

As to using this sort of a project as a intro to programming... it is not an out-of-reach goal, but if you have never programed before, figure that it will be at least 6 months before you can really start work on the project itself. And it will be slow going after that (everyone makes a lot of false starts at first). I am not trying to discourage you, just to give you a reasonably good idea.

[kisol007]

Yea, I looked into Word and a few other existing text editors but I am looking for something that does exactly the things I want...

And I understand that I might just be shooting at clouds here; but I am willing to try it out and learn what I need to. 6 months, 18 months, whatever.... I would just like to start heading down this road!

So any suggestions as to what approach I should be taking?

Thanks for your response.

[Kristoff]

Acrobat....

[iOliverC]

Originally posted by kisol007:
Yea, I looked into Word and a few other existing text editors but I am looking for something that does exactly the things I want...

And I understand that I might just be shooting at clouds here; but I am willing to try it out and learn what I need to. 6 months, 18 months, whatever.... I would just like to start heading down this road!

So any suggestions as to what approach I should be taking?

Thanks for your response.

If I understand what you want, you should lookup on NSTextView, and maybe for the commenting bit, NSRulerView (so you can attach something to the side of NSTextView).

[kisol007]

Yea, looked at Acrobat already. Thank though.

OK, well, I will dive in and start messing around with NSTextView and NSRulerView and see where I end up!

Thanks.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by kisol007:
Yea, looked at Acrobat already. Thank though.

OK, well, I will dive in and start messing around with NSTextView and NSRulerView and see where I end up!

Thanks.

Overall I'd say, if you're gonna learn to program, learn to program. Get a book on Cocoa (this forum has a number of recommendations), read it, do the exercises, and get comfortable with it. From there start playing with NSTextView, make some test apps for concepts you want in your program, then try doing it. Cocoa isn't "hard" exactly (as opposed to say, Carbon), but it helps a lot to be comfortable with programming.