I've been doing a bit of brushing up on the latest and greatest Mac development technologies. It's been interesting, to say the least.
To some degree or another, I'd been doing Mac programming since 1988 (ok, who else remembers the "phone book" version of Inside Mac?)... Lightspeed (later Think) Pascal, Think C, MPW, CodeWarrior... including a range of applications, networking tools and even printer drivers. Recently its been more cross-platform stuff, either lower-level C/C++, things like Tcl/Tk, and so on. I've done little bits and pieces with XCode/Cocoa, but nothing substantial. Having said that, I've remained interested and have followed along with what's new, i.e. I could name the technologies and tell you what they do, even if I couldn't use them.
I wanted to take a closer look at a few of the "newer" things... Cocoa bindings, Core Animation, Core Data, etc. Like with most frameworks (vs. libraries) there is a big learning curve to actually putting together an application, since you really need to know what holes to fill and how to fill them. And with everything building off of everything else, plus compatibility with older ways of doing things, it can at times be tough to follow. There's a lot of good documentation and examples luckily.
It is pretty cool how much these new technologies will help take care of that you would have had to do manually before. On the other hand, it does seem like Mac development is less and less like programming or coding (in the classical sense), and more like wire-wrapping...