When working on a Mac or iOS project with more than one person, you quickly learn that attempting to merge conflicted Interface Builder files or XCode project files can only result in tears. But just because you can't work on the same NIB doesn't mean that the productivity of the entire team should be blocked by the one person editing MainMenu.xib. Cocoa allows you chop your UI into separate NIBs and control them with multiple NSWindowControllers.

When building a shared library for an iOS application, we have no choice but to either provide the source files or a static library that developers can link to. But when building a library for Mac OSX applications we have the option of providing that functionality in the form of a framework. Specific to Mac OSX, frameworks are similar to a dynamic library but provide several key advantages.

My first foray into Objective-C was, for lack of a better description, a sink-or-swim situation. Our lead iPhone developer had just been laid off and the boss was in my office the next day asking me how quickly I could "get up to speed". "You know Ruby", he said, "How difficult could it be?" It was time to get some books.