Apple is taking the world by storm. Their market share is growing faster than the industry average and has been for years. So, 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 a multi-touch trackpad or uses a camera, you will need 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 that takes advantage of some of the unique aspects of OS X.
You will learn how to use Xcode tools to create and share Mac OS X Apps and explore numerous OS X features including iCloud, multi-touch trackpad, and the iSight camera.
Using fundamental development concepts and innovative platform features, this book provides you with an illustrated and annotated guide to bring your ideas to life!
Chapter 1, Our First Program – SimpleCalc, covers how to get up and running with the Xcode Integrated Development Environment (IDE). We create an App icon, a user interface, implement the App behavior, and build and run the App with Xcode.
Chapter 2, Debugger – Finding and Fixing Problems, covers the concept of debugging our program code. We learn how to explore our program code when the debugger is invoked, how to change the values of our variables with the debugger, and how to use the debugger to find and fix problems in our program.
Chapter 3, System Preferences – NewDefaults, covers creating our own System Preference plugin and learning how to run command-line tools from within the System Preference to customize the behavior of the Mac OS X Finder.
Chapter 4, Business Application – Global Currency Converter, covers how to get publicly-available data from the Internet and use it to create a currency converter. We will download an XML file from the Internet and extract the information that we need from it into our program. We learn how to access the Internet using a background thread so that our user interface does not freeze while we wait for the XML file to download. Finally, we learn how to use pop-up menus, table views, and how to perform arithmetic operations on an array of numbers.
Chapter 5, Personal Information – Numbers in the iCloud, how to take your data and store it on the Internet using Cloud services Cloud services. Cloud services are popping up everywhere. We learn about Apple's iCloud and how to store and retrieve information from the iCloud servers. Along the way, we learn how to implement two table views in the same window and how to implement a toolbar.
Chapter 6, Painting – Multi-finger Paint, covers multi-touch. Mobile computing has introduced a new way of interacting with computer touches and gestures. Laptop and desktop computing have adopted this trend through the use of multi-touch trackpads. In this chapter, we learn about multi-touch, including how to handle multi-touch and gesture events. We also learn how to use the 2D drawing features of Mac OS X to draw into custom views.
Chapter 7, Capturing Still Images – iSight iMage cApture App, covers how to use the Image Kit Framework to capture and manipulate still images using the iSight camera.
Chapter 8, Video Recording – iSight Recorder, covers capturing videos. While capturing still images is nice, capturing movies is better. In this chapter, we learn how to use Quicktime Kit Capture to preview Video and Audio, to capture still frames, and to record movies using the iSight camera.
Chapter 9, Video Recording – Full Screen iSight Recorder, covers how to convert a windowed App to a full screen App. We'll learn how to convert our iSight Recorder App to a full screen App, including enhancing the user interface, giving the screen an illusion of depth, and implementing the animations used to enter and exit full screen.
Chapter 10, Sharing our App with others – Becoming a Mac developer. Now that we know how to create Mac OS X Apps, we'll want to share them. This chapter explores both the free and paid Apple developer programs - describing the features of each as well as explaining how to join them and why you might want to. It also explains code signing - what it is and how to do it. Then we'll be able to share our Mac Apps and have them interact nicely with modern security software like Gatekeeper on Mac OS X 10.8.
You need a Mac OS X computer capable of running Mac OS X 10.7 or later. Some App features require Mac OS X 10.8. You also need to install Xcode Version 4 from the Mac OS X App store. Xcode is a free download.
This book is for people who are programming beginners and have a great idea for a Mac OS X app and need to get started.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "In the file named BTSAppDelegate.h use the #import directive to import the <QTKit/QTKit.h> file so that the QTKit interface objects can be referenced."
A block of code is set as follows:
// Define two local variables
// that will contain the results
// of various operations
BOOL l_success = NO;
NSError* l_error;When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
// Define two local variables
// that will contain the results
// of various operations
BOOL l_success = NO;
NSError* l_error;New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "When we click the Next button, Xcode will ask us to select options for our new project".
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