MoneyLounge, 9 days old

MoneyLounge is now in development. After several weeks swatting up on Objective-C and Cocoa development I've kicked the project off and have managed to put together a very simple interface with some limited functionality. So far I can import .QIF account files, load and save data and scroll through accounts, transactions and categories. Not too bad a start, given it's only been 9 days so far. I was a little worried about how I was going to store all the data, but Objective-C supports a quite robust class archiving and encoding protocol, that allows you to very easily store an object-graph directly to disk. This means that assuming you've followed the flavor of Object Oriented Design encouraged by Objective-C, i.e. wrapping all data in classes, then load and saving the data stored in those classes is quite trivial. My one big headache so far has been memory allocation. Objective-C doesn't do background garbage collection for you and it's system of object retention is a little confusing for someone like me. I've been developing in languages like PL/SQL, PeopleCode & Powerbuilder for a few years now and allocating memory and cleaning up objects is something you just don't have to worry about. I've also found Objective-C to be somewhat verbose. To append one string to another string and assign it to another string in most languages you'd use something like:
s1 = s2 + s3.

In Objective-C that becomes:
s1 = [[s2 stringByAppendingString:s3] mutableCopy];

Still, you get used to it. The screen-shot attached to the blog is NOT some sort of early, primitive GUI design for how the final application will look. It's simply a bunch of text views to allow me to check that data has been loaded correctly. If this thing ever gets finished it'll be fun to look back at how the application looked when it was nine days old.