I’ve been learning Cocoa and Objective-C over the past week, and it’s coming along great. I already have the basics for the Objective-C language down (actually, it’s nice because it’s a lot like C and Ruby combined, as far as theory), and I’m learning the frameworks for Cocoa.

As of now, I’m diving straight into Core Data and the NSXML libraries, building an application that integrates with my web site. It’s only taken me about 4 to 5 hours of development time, and already I have learned how to remotely connect to a REST web service, consume the data, and inject it into a Core Data application.

The app, tentatively called BlogREST, has a long road map ahead of it. Here is a short list of what I want it to do, and it will hopefully do within the next few months:

• Connect to a REST-powered blog web service (read: Ruby on Rails), and consume the XML provided
• Allow the consumed XML to be stored in a local data store, allowing data to be edited and managed locally, then sync up with the web server
• At first, the app will only support one XML schema (based off my web app), but eventually I hope to allow the user to define and map their field names

Of course, the interface isn’t the greatest (I’m not even going to post a picture of it right now, that’s how bad it is), but that will come along with the rest of the application. Stay tuned for updates!