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.

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Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Title Page
Title Page
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Dedication
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Hello macOS
Hello macOS
It's going to be Swift
And more than Swift
It's going to be Xcode and more
The book's overall structure
The serious developer's toolkit
What you'll get from this book
Summary
2
Basic Swift
Basic Swift
Variables and types
Comments
Arrays, dictionaries, and sets
Value and reference types
Operators
Structs, classes, and other data structures
Enumerations
Optionals
Control flow
Functions
Summary
3
Checking Out the Power of Xcode
Checking Out the Power of Xcode
A quick and simple sketch app
Speeding it up with code snippets
Logging with special literals
Getting the most out of breakpoints
Behaviors
Understanding schemes
Why build configs are so cool
Summary
4
MVC and Other Design Patterns
MVC and Other Design Patterns
Programming paradigms
Encapsulation
A path through the forest
Summary
5
Advanced Swift
Advanced Swift
Control flow
Functions
Enumerations as data structures
Protocols
Customizing operators
Collection types
Optionals
Summary
6
Cocoa Frameworks - The Backbone of Your Apps
Cocoa Frameworks - The Backbone of Your Apps
Understanding Foundation Kit
Import statements
Leveraging key-value observing
Cocoa bindings
Summary
7
Creating Views Programmatically
Creating Views Programmatically
Why code instead of IB?
Setting our goals
Coding a table view
Observing without bindings
Adding further control elements in code
Summary
8
Strings and Text
Strings and Text
Strings and characters
NSTextView
Summary
9
Getting More from Interface Builder
Getting More from Interface Builder
Advanced IB navigation
Debug View Hierarchy
Encapsulating views with NSStackView
Taming the storyboard
Summary
10
Drawing on the Strength of Core Graphics
Drawing on the Strength of Core Graphics
Why not use an image?
Why not use native views?
Creating custom views
Custom buttons
Dial clock
Pie clock
Summary
11
Core Animation
Core Animation
What is Core Animation?
Introducing CALayer
Animating CALayer objects
Animating NSViews
Summary
12
Handling Errors Gracefully
Handling Errors Gracefully
Errors aren't mistakes
Expecting the unexpected
Swift error handling
NSError handling
Summary
13
Persistent Storage
Persistent Storage
Creating a project
Using UserDefaults
Saving text to the Documents folder
NSCoding/NSKeyedArchiver
Presenting open and save dialog boxes
Summary
14
The Benefits of Core Data
The Benefits of Core Data
What Core Data is, and isn't
Core Data, Cocoa Bindings, and no code
Using our data model
More about Core Data
Summary
15
Connect to the World - Networking
Connect to the World - Networking
Patterns for downloading data
Downloading using closures
Downloading using a URLSession delegate
No third-party frameworks?
The URLSession framework
Cache rewards
Summary
16
Concurrency and Asynchronous Programming
Concurrency and Asynchronous Programming
Concurrency and asynchronicity
Summary
17
Understanding Xcodes Debugging Tools
Understanding Xcodes Debugging Tools
Checking out Xcode's debugging tools
Leveraging breakpoints
Summary
18
LLDB and the Command Line
LLDB and the Command Line
LLDB
Summary
19
Deploying Third - Party Code
Deploying Third - Party Code
Common use cases
Distribution methods
Pros and cons
Different installation methods
Other package managers
The price of complexity
Summary
20
Wrapping It Up
Wrapping It Up
App distribution
Summary
And finally

Chapter 16. Concurrency and Asynchronous Programming

Any program that you write for Mac OS will need to share the processor's computing power with other programs.

Any program you write for Mac OS will almost certainly run on more than one processor at the same time. That is, even if only one user is using it, it will still be running on more than one processor.

And the majority of programs you will write will sometimes need to ask other programs somewhere, anywhere on the planet, for their help.

Apps, programs, tasks, and processes, call them what you will and draw the dividing lines where you wish, are very sociable entities; working together is the essence of their being.

Welcome to concurrent and asynchronous programming.

As developers, it is our responsibility to ensure that this cooperation between processes runs smoothly, efficiently, and reliably. It is the responsibility of this chapter to ensure that, after working through it, you will have a firm understanding of the concepts involved...

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