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

Creating custom views


In this chapter, we are going to use both AppKit and direct Core Graphics code to create custom views. Two of those views will be clock faces, which will give us ample opportunities to explore the most common drawing methods. The other view will be a fairly straightforward custom button.

We are not actually designing an app, so much as designing subclasses of NSView that can be added to any app we wish. We are designing views outside of an actual app project.

This is a good way to ensure that your code is well encapsulated, as well as helping us to focus on the task at hand, rather than being distracted by the rest of an app's implementation.

So, each of these views will hold all the methods and properties needed to draw itself, without needing to refer to the environment in which it is created. When we initiate one of these views, we will only need to supply the frame in which it is to be drawn, much as we would do with any other view.