I'm very intrigued by the tools and Objective C environment available for OS X, and have studied what I can find on them, but I don't have a Mac, so how to get a good feel for them?Talking of RAD design tools, anyone who wants to build a UI designer should take a serious look at Apple's Interface Builder. It would be a good idea to keep the IDE and the interface designer separate, and communicate via BMessages. That way, one person/team can write a UI designer and every existing IDE can use it. Same goes for build tools, resource editors, foobar. I really like the Paladin approach. The IDE only manages your project structure, and relies on external applications for editing and building. All IMO, of course :)
Absolutely on the second part. I'm starting some experiments to come up with a framework like this for SS (Sisong), possibly including replicants as part of the functionality (the initial concept is to turn the Function List side-panel on the right into a replicant shelf, and then other stuff can be dropped in there. using some sort of BMessage interface to talk to the core editor). I'm hoping the other IDE's can help develop the concept further. Then you could take e.g. the Function List from SS, the Project Manager from Paladin, and use them all at once in your IDE of choice. This sort of thing would also help keep the IDEs modular, reducing the complexity of the code while allowing all sorts of powerful things to be done, yet the developer of each component only need worry about that component.
--Ok I'm going to go read about this OpenBinder thing Ryan just mentioned.
