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

Cocoa bindings


A technology central to macOS development, Cocoa bindings is a feature that allows you to establish connections between the AppKit classes that we use to provide an app with standardized UI elements, and your model object's (or objects') data. There are other ways to do this, but at the moment we will concentrate on bindings, since they can save us large amounts of what is generally referred to as glue code, the stuff that tells your data model what the user has done, and tells your user interface what change the model has made to its data.

Using Cocoa bindings, we can keep the data and the UI synchronized at all times. And the amazing thing is, we do it without a single line of code.

If you already have a fair amount of experience in programming for OS X/macOS, you will probably have some idea of how to use Cocoa bindings, but we will nevertheless run quickly through how to connect your UI in Interface Builder with your data model.

Since we have the PeopleWatcher app lying around...