Hello,
I'm a complete beginner at all this stuff, although i do have programming background. I've reviewed some of the documentation and see that it's quite easy to program the board from OSX, but using it's own custom language/software.
Is it possible to interface the board from a Cocoa app? How about .NET?
yes you can use cocoa to program it as well as .net. You can also use REALbasic for mac,linux, or wintel. I use cocoa as my prefered language but I fall back on REALBasic for the quick and dirty apps.
Any examples of cocoa code - say reading a serial port, sending to a serial port, opening and closing a port? This seems to be what's quite hard to do in Cocoa. The Apple docs are too complex on this!
all docs are very hard to follow i agree. I have a few example scripts on my web page http://web.mac.com/miked13/iWeb/Arduino