This isn’t quite as visual as most, but because it’s a solid stake in the ground for me, I thought it was worthy of being posted to the Process blog.

I’ve been taking a class on Cocoa, the development platform for Apple OS X, and this is my Final assignment for that class.

Download it and try it out for yourself. Draw around to start up a board and click Start or Step to advance the Simulation. Random and Clear can generate interesting patterns as well.

Up until now my complete programming knowledge has been for deployment on the web or for creating small custom tools in the process of a larger project not for deployment at all. Learning Cocoa has been very challenging for me, and a great foray into deployable applications (and programming in C for that matter).

The midterm project for this class was to create an RSS Reader.

This was particularly challenging for me considering the amount of back-end complexity that needed to be implemented considering that I have no prior knowledge of C code.

It’s functional and if you’re really down with an almost-elegant Really Simple Reader, you can download the application and try it out for yourself.