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

NSTextView


We have our strings, we have our attributes, and we'll now take a look at the place where we put them to use: NSTextView.

An NSTextView, a subclass of NSText, is actually a complex, multi-facetted object, consisting of a small, specialized stack of object types, all hidden behind what appears to the user to be nothing but a blank part of the screen. If only they knew.

NSTextView provides the view in which the text is displayed, exposing the properties textContainer and textStorage, with which we can supply it with text, and display that text on the screen. The two objects that these properties expose communicate with each other via a LayoutManager object.

The MVC pattern of text views

Cocoa's text view is in fact a microcosmic version of the Model-View-Controller design pattern followed by so much of Apple's frameworks:

  • NSTextStorage is the model, containing all the string and attributes data
  • NSTextContainer is the view, providing the de facto page onto which we draw text
  • NSLayoutManager...