Flash card 101

Question

No, not like Secure digital or one of those memory sticks.
I am trying to write a flash card program for memorising japanese vocabulary as my first dev project on mac.
My formal programming education ended after a C- of programming 101 in my local college, but I have been programming for a while now.
The program simply shows japanese word/englisgh word (i hope mac os x has no problem having japanese characters) and then once a button is pushed, shows the equivalent of that in the other language.
Is apple script an appropriate language for this purpose?
I haven't even installed xcode yet, but I have a couple questions:
1) how do I do interface with interface builder? this would be my first project with GUI.
2) how do I store the words combinations in a "database" ?
I can image something like this:
wordsdatabase.txt
1:neko:cat
2:inu:dog
and so forth, but i don't know how to implement it.
Thank you for reading and replying!
P.S. Why not just use paper, pencil and scisor? It's more fun this way LOL

Answer 1

Is apple script an appropriate language for this purpose?
Plain vanilla AppleScript could possibly be used, but the app would be somewhat clunky because AS doesn't offer much flexibility with it's GUI user interaction.
On the other hand, if you want to learn and use AppleScript then an _AppleScript Studio_ application might work pretty well. AppleScript Studio is basically AppleScript + extensions for most of the Cocoa GUI elements so it gives you almost as much flexibility with the GUI as a native Cocoa app would. AS Studio apps are also written and built using Xcode (rather than Script Editor).
But if you've done C based programming in the past then there will be a learning curve for AppleScript. But for that matter, there will also be somewhat of a learning curve to start using Obj-C and Cocoa... it depends on what your level of experience is.
1) how do I do interface with interface builder? this would be my first project with GUI.
This is sort of a vague question. When you create a project in Xcode any of the project templates that generate GUI applications will already have one or more basic/generic Interface Builder files included in the project. You just double-click them within Xcode and they'll launch IB for you.
It'll probably make more sense once you install Xcode and start playing with some of the examples. And once you've fiddled with IB a little then you'll probably have some more specific questions.
2) how do I store the words combinations in a "database" ?
I can image something like this:
wordsdatabase.txt
1:neko:cat
2:inu:dog
and so forth, but i don't know how to implement it.
This is something you'll need to decide for your particular case.
A text file like you've indicated could work.
You might also consider using a property list (.plist) file. Cocoa has some built in methods that make loading an entire plist file into an NSDictionary object really easy. In addition, the Xcode Tools installer will install "Property List Editor" which you can use to manually create/edit property list files.
Mac OS X / Cocoa also includes "Core Data" which is a data storage and retrieval API that includes support for both XML or SQLite built in. This may be overkill for your particular situation but you might want to consider looking at it.
If you decide on AppleScript or AS Studio you could potentially use a "list of lists" where each sublist contained a Japanese word and it's English equivalent. Something like this
property wordList : {{"neko", "cat"}, {"inu", "dog"}, {"x", "y"}, ... }
-- iterate thru the words and spit them out to the event log
repeat with wordPair in wordList
set japaneseWord to item 1 of wordPair
set englishWord to item 2 of wordPair
log("Japanese: " & japaneseWord & " English: " & englishWord)
end repeat
-- Generates output like this in the event log
(*Japanese: neko English: cat*)
(*Japanese: inu English: dog*)
(*Japanese: x English: y*)
But the above example has the words contained in a property of the AppleScript in which case you'd have to edit and modify the script whenever you wanted to change your word list. It might be a better idea to keep your words in an external file of some sort so you could update your words without having to modify your script/program.
There are lot's of possibilities.
Steve