[Outie]

Hello Mac Forums,

I am looking for a little direction and a few good people to point me into it, so I knew this would be my first stop in asking for help. A few fellow coworkers and I are looking into developing a software application for Mac OS X Native.

After doing research for the past 3 years and working in the particular field for the past 14 years I have decided to write my own application. This application will be used in the private sector in an office setting (servers, sql server, workstations).

The basis of the application will be a setting where the workstations would use a client application to access information from a sql server (MySQL Pro) and pull in information for the client to see. This is very very basic in the structure but just laying the ground work for my question.

So knowing how I want the application to work, I am asking what is the best program to use in programing it? I have seen a few different ones for OS X and it seems Cocoa might be able to do it.

Any suggestions would be great!

Thanks

Outie

[nerd]

xCode is your choice for the program and you can download it from Apple. I read Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Arron Hillegass and it's a very good book. I'd recommend it to get up to speed with xCode. I read he's coming out with an updated version of the book in the spring which will talk more about the features in xCode 3 but you'll still get a good grasp with his current book.

[larkost]

Since you don't seem to know much about this, I would recommend downloading a demo copy of FileMaker Pro and giving that a whirl first. You can get a lot done quickly with FileMaker that would take a long time trying to do with any other system. FileMaker will handle all of the nasty concurrency issues that you would spend a lot of time discovering by yourself, and is going to make life much easier.

Note that it is going to be a little expensive to get a copy of FileMaker for each computer, and once you go beyond a few workstations you are going to want to pay for a copy of 'Server. But it is very much worth the speed-up in development time and lack of headaches.