My first contact with Objective-C and Cocoa was somewhere around 2001 or 2002 when I decided to tinker with the contents of the developer disc included in the OS X retail box, and while I toyed with Interface Builder (which resembled REALBasic, which I’d previously been using) quite a lot I wouldn’t write anything functional for another couple of years.

Newbie material for Obj-C and Cocoa was truly slim pickings at that point, particularly if your local library was too small to carry those books and you couldn’t afford to buy them yourself. All I had to go off of was the odd blog post I’d run across and later on, patient AIM friends (who I am still grateful to) who’d explain things if I asked, so it took a while to become able to write anything significant.