Simple approach to develop an text editing tool for the mac?

Question

I come from the iPhone development world but have never developed desktop applications.

Now I want to write a small but helpful text editor for helping wiring small articles. I have found that I always summarize knowledge in TextEdit in a raw, not nicely formatted manner. Next, I go through that and start forming useful sentences out of what I have gathered there.

The tool I want to write will have this features:

• the interface is splitted in two main sections, pretty much like an FTP client: On the left there's the actual text to write. On the right there are the raw notes. Both independently scrollable and editable.

• at least the left-side editor should have some basic markup capabilities, similar to TextEdit.

I assume that there is already a good and useful class for doing exactly that. So the question is: Which are good starting points here? Are there any open source projects for mac text editors I could have a look at?

Answer 1

TextEdit itself is given as an example as part of the developer tools install see /Developer/Examples/TextEdit

Answer 2

Which are good starting points here?

Read the Cocoa text system documentation, or the other Cocoa text system documentation.

You can usually just drop a text view into your window and let it do all the work. You only need to handle loading it with data and saving data from it.