I’ve got ADD, I’m sure of it. I get exhausted just trying to keep up with my brain, which seems to switch its focus before I can even figure out what it was just focusing on. I believe that a lot of people with any degree of creativity find themselves suffering this same problem. Often times it’s about finding the best way for you to control it - for me, it’s music. If I have a lot of work to do, I put on headphones, crank some great tunes, and it drowns out all but what my eyes are focused on - which is my work.

Keeping this in mind, I recently decided to learn Objective-C and Cocoa to write some native OSX apps - and perhaps some iPhone apps in the future. Now, I’m nowhere near declaring that I’m an Objective-C expert - I’m still a n00b. But that said, I’m less n00b than once I was.

My first stem was to get what is probably the preeminent book on Objective-C - “Programming in Objective-C” by Stephen Kochan. It’s the most recommended Objective-C book on the internet, is considered required reading before hopping on the #objc channel on irc.freenode.net, and is so well written it’s good for both people completely new to code, as well as seasoned programmers such as myself.

Problem was, once I had the book, I couldn’t concentrate long enough to actually get through a full chapter.

Learn your way

I don’t learn by reading. I learn by doing. If I read about a certain way of coding something and don’t actually do it at least once, I will forget it. Once I actually implement the code - even if it’s just in a throw-away test file - it’s committed to memory.

So I finally landed in XCode, and just started writing code. I was fortunate enough to have a friend here to help with some of the very basics of the XCode project structure, but that information can be readily had on the internet. I often turned to “Programming in Objective-C” as a fantastic reference (and I did learn the basics of Objective-C message passing and data types via the book) but it was only that - a reference that helped me along the way.

I learned by rewriting MultiFirefox.

So I announce to you today that MultiFirefox has been rewritten “from the ground up” (that phrase always bothers me) in Objective-C and Cocoa. It’s got some nice new features, like Sparkle integration (that means it has auto-updates!) and auto-determination of how many versions of Firefox you have installed - so install as many as you like! This also fixes a big bug dealing with phrase-based profile names.

So go pick it up! MultiFirefox 2.0 - your newest old friend, and mine.

P.S. - thanks so much to everyone who has downloaded MultiFirefox and written about it in the past two months. We’re over 10,000 downloads - that’s crazy! Thank you!!