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

Locating developer tools


Before we start to develop our first Mac OS X program, we need to locate the tools needed to create programs. There are several different choices for software development on Mac OS X and the tools that we will select depend on the programming environment that we want to use. Because we want to write our programs using the native Objective-C programming language and the Cocoa frameworks we are going to use Apple's free Integrated Development Environment (IDE), called Xcode.

The code in this book has been developed and tested with Xcode 4.3.

Tip

Cocoa frameworks

The Cocoa frameworks consist of libraries, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and runtimes that form the development layer for all of Mac OS X. By developing with Cocoa, we will be creating applications the same way Mac OS X itself is created. Our application will automatically inherit the behavior and appearances of Mac OS X. Using Cocoa with Xcode IDE is the best way to create native Mac applications.