Where to start making an application like ACDsee

I am new to Cocoa, but I would like to give a shot to a project for my college course in programming.

Basically what i am trying to achieve is a simple cocoa app that is able to read into a directory, make thumbnails of the supported files, and display the files when double clicked. Basically if you have ever seen ACDsee you know what i am trying to replicate (without any editing function or extra features: just read files in a dir using the hierarchy view on the left, and make a list of thumbnails on the right)

Not sure where to start; I know OBJ-C but i am totally new开发者_运维百科 to graphical apps, so any suggestion about where to look would be really appreciated.

Thanks!

Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition) is really good and will help a lot.

I would suggest to have a look at apple documentation to learn a bit more about objective-c as a programming language that supports the object oriented programming paradigm (I hope you know it, nevertheless obj-c is a nice language to start programming in object-oriented with). With Apple documentation you will get lots of tutorial and sample code (I suggest also that you sign like a developer, for free). Plus there are many video tutorials and podcasts on itunes U. The steps that you may take are: 1- learn a bit more about obj-c and XCode (you will you it as the programming ide) 2- get into cocoa (or cocoa touch) and Interface Builder (another developing tool, useful for creating graphical interfaces by writing less code, built into the next version of xcode) 3- Try to understand code and complete project samples (and asking for help here) ASsuming that you are comfortable with programming in oo and you know some design patterns useful to understand how to build an app