Book Image

Mac Application Development by Example: Beginner's Guide

By : Robert Wiebe
Book Image

Mac Application Development by Example: Beginner's Guide

By: Robert Wiebe

Overview of this book

It's never been more important to have the ability to develop an App for Mac OS X. Whether it's a System Preference, a business app that accesses information in the Cloud, or an application that uses multi-touch or uses a camera, you will have a solid foundation in app development to get the job done.Mac Application Development by Example takes you through all the aspects of using the Xcode development tool to produce complete working apps that cover a broad range of topics. This comprehensive book on developing applications covers everything a beginner needs to know and demonstrates the concepts using examples that take advantage of some of the most interesting hardware and software features available.You will discover the fundamental aspects of OS X development while investigating innovative platform features to create a final product which take advantage of the unique aspects of OS X.Learn how to use Xcode tools to create and share Mac OS X apps. Explore numerous OS X features including iCloud, multi-touch trackpad, and the iSight camera.This book provides you with an illustrated and annotated guide to bring your idea to life using fundamental concepts that work on Mac.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mac Application Development by Example Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 3. System Preferences – NewDefaults

This chapter will walk us through the steps needed to create a System Preference pane. A System Preference, rather than being a standalone double-clickable App, is a plugin or bundle, that can be loaded by the System Preferences App to display our own system preference.

The System Preference that we implement in this chapter is going to use an NSTask object to run a command-line tool as a separate process from within the preference pane. While we will not go into the intricate details of how NSTask runs and communicates with external processes, it is a topic that you may wish to investigate further.

In this chapter, we shall learn the following:

  • Creating preference panes

  • The 64-bit transition and how it affects our preference pane

  • Creating a preference pane project in Xcode

  • Configuring a preference pane project in Xcode

  • Sudden termination

  • Customizing a bundle project to implement new behavior

  • Running command-line tools from a Cocoa program