<p>I've become very comfortable in the world of pointer-free, garbage-collected programming languages. Now I have to write a small Mac component. I've been learning Objective-C, but as I confront the possibility of dangling pointers and the need to manage retain counts, I feel disheartened.</p>

<p>I know that Objective-C now has garbage collection but this only works with Leopard. My component must work with Tiger, too.</p>

<p>I need to access some Cocoa libraries not available to Java, so that rules out my usual weapon of choice.</p>

<p>What are my alternatives? Especially with no explicit pointers and automatic garbage collection.</p>

Look at
Python
and
wxPython
(the wxWidgets in Python).
The wxWidgets have a very elegant App-Doc-View application design pattern that's very, very nice.  It's not used enough, IMO.  I haven't found any wxPython examples of this App-Doc-View example, so you have to use the C examples to reason out how it would work in Python.
I'd post examples, but I haven't got it all working yet, either.