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

The transition to 64 bit from 32 bit


In a nutshell, desktop computer operating systems (Mac, Windows, and Linux) are in transition from 32 bit to 64 bit so that computer hardware can support more than 4 GB of Random Access Memory (RAM).

For Mac OS X, the transitionary version of the OS happens to be Mac OS X 10.7. This means that as of Mac OS X 10.7 there is still support for 32-bit Apps and 32-bit System Preferences (that is, those that are limited to 4 GB of memory) but that Apple want developers to switch to 64-bit Apps and System Preferences because future versions of Mac OS X will not support the 32-bit versions.

While many developers need to go through a transition, because they have existing program code or because they want to continue to support older 32-bit systems for some time to come, we are not going to consider the 32-bit issue (other than this mention of it) so everything that we develop will be 64 bit.

We need to be aware of this because it is possible that if we try to share...