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

Custom buttons


We will start with a simple custom button, which will serve as an uncomplicated first look into AppKit and Core Graphics.

We will design the view in a standard template macOS app, so create a new project and call it CoreGraphicsTest or something. The name doesn't matter, since it's the classes that we design that we will use in other apps (whose names presumably do matter).

Drag a Custom View object onto the View Controller Scene, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

Set its Width and Height properties as 200 in the size inspector (command+ option + 5).

Before we start coding, let's take a look at what the finished result will look like:

Defining the custom button's properties

To begin with, we'll create a class and make the Interface Builder custom view an instance of that.

Follow these steps:

  1. Create a new Cocoa class file, name it ButtonView, and make it a subclass of NSButton.
  2. This will give you a stub implementation of the ButtonView class in a file named ButtonView.swift...