Book Image

Mastering macOS Programming.

By : Stuart Grimshaw, Gregory Casamento
Book Image

Mastering macOS Programming.

By: Stuart Grimshaw, Gregory Casamento

Overview of this book

macOS continues to lead the way in desktop operating systems, with its tight integration across the Apple ecosystem of platforms and devices. With this book, you will get an in-depth knowledge of working on macOS, enabling you to unleash the full potential of the latest version using Swift 3 to build applications. This book will help you broaden your horizons by taking your programming skills to next level. The initial chapters will show you all about the environment that surrounds a developer at the start of a project. It introduces you to the new features that Swift 3 and Xcode 8 offers and also covers the common design patterns that you need to know for planning anything more than trivial projects. You will then learn the advanced Swift programming concepts, including memory management, generics, protocol orientated and functional programming and with this knowledge you will be able to tackle the next several chapters that deal with Apple’s own Cocoa frameworks. It also covers AppKit, Foundation, and Core Data in detail which is a part of the Cocoa umbrella framework. The rest of the book will cover the challenges posed by asynchronous programming, error handling, debugging, and many other areas that are an indispensable part of producing software in a professional environment. By the end of this book, you will be well acquainted with Swift, Cocoa, and AppKit, as well as a plethora of other essential tools, and you will be ready to tackle much more complex and advanced software projects.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface
18
LLDB and the Command Line

Why not use native views?


The same arguments apply to the choice between standard button and other controls, and building your own. Often, you will want to use the familiar controls provided as is by Cocoa.

And often, you won't.

The modern requirements of branding, corporate identity, or just an app studio's own style, means that having buttons, faders, and other elements that conform to a particular image or style, are easy to incorporate into an app's UI, especially once a small library of code templates has been built up (and it's amazing just how quickly that happens).

Hopefully, by the end of this chapter, you'll be fully convinced that drawing in code is as productive as it is fun.

Core Graphics and AppKit drawing

Essentially, we have two ways to access the functionality made available by Core Graphics:

  • We can use AppKit code, which wraps Core Image code in a simple and abstracted, though limited, interface
  • We can call the CG methods directly, leveraging all its power, but with the additional...