I am not interested in API documentation or how-to recipes. I am looking for explanations that will help me build a conceptual understanding of macos UI development. What is the equivalent of the event loop under macos? Do events bubble up through the hierarchy? What is the right way to persist user configuration?
In the windows era there was a very famous book called "Programming Windows" by Charles Petzold. I am hoping that I can find similar book for macOS programming.
Please do point me to the resources that have helped you.
I am not interested in non-native frameworks like Electron or PyQt. If I am developing an app for myself I don't want to deal with daily irritation of working with a non native framework.
https://forums.bignerdranch.com/c/cocoa-programming-for-os-x...
They also have a Swift book, but I haven't personally read it. They also have an Advanced Mac OS X book, but it's also old and isn't on their website anymore.
it depends on your learning style of course, but if you like lecture / course-style learning, i highly recommend paul hegarty's CS193P, it will definitely give you the in-depth, conceptual explanations you're describing.
while it is an iOS dev course (taught at stanford, lectures are freely offered online), the newest lectures are using swiftUI for UI, so pretty much all of it will translate to doing macOS dev.
paul is a cs prof at stanford and worked at NeXT and then on the objc lang many, many years ago, so he's been doing this a while and knows a thing or two :)
I’m not sure that I can recommend starting with SwiftUI, yet. The tech is still quite green, and quite different from AppKit (the current MacOS framework). The documentation also … leaves something to be desired …
But it also depends on how soon you want to be shipping software.
It might be a great idea to start with SwiftUI, if you think you’re still a couple of years from releasing stuff. I’m sure it will mature rapidly.
Of course, you could also learn a cross-platform system, like Electron, or React Native. I can’t make any suggestions, there.
Source: Been shipping native Mac software for over 30 years.
It's Apple's future for cross platform (ios/macos/watch) applications. Hardcore longtime mac devs find it frustratingly unable to do some complex things they want to do (and yay that they do!) to take advantage of the mac OS. But you don't want that; you just want to interact with your own code. And SwiftUI will let you do the basic stuff easily...and likely just (well, almost just) recompile your program for your iphone or ipad.
I started with one of the Big Nerd Ranch books many years ago. I spent a few evenings reading it, and then spent a few hours dabbling with Objective C in XCode. I then got frustrated and put it down for a few years until I took a job that involved some Objective C. (This was over a decade ago.)
It's surprisingly easy to learn the details of system calls by Googling and looking at stack overflow. Yes, the semantics are different, but the general theory is the same. There's a main thread that's often referred to as the main run loop. Accessing your UI outside of the main run loop (thread) is a big no-no.
As much as I want to vouch for learning Swift, (it's really easy if you have a Java / C# background,) there's also a good reason to be proficient in Objective C: It's just a layer on top of C. It's very easy to wrap C APIs in Objective C and then call them from Swift. This is important, because if you're trying to do something low-level, you will need to interact with a C API. (Although, Swift fixes a lot of the weirdness of Objective C if all you want is something that's like Java / C#.)
FWIW: There are some semantic differences that can take some time to adjust to. In Objective C, sending a message to a null object is a no-op instead of a runtime exception. Swift appears memory safe, but I've done things with timers that cause surprise crashes.
> What is the equivalent of the event loop under macos?
NSRunLoop / CFRunLoop. You rarely need to interact with it directly. Typically only the main run loop on the main thread is important, if you want to do something on a different thread you typically use dispatch queues (GCD=grand central dispatch) instead of run loops.
> Do events bubble up through the hierarchy?
Yes, most events go up the responder chain, which is typically view -> superviews -> window -> app. You typically respond to events by implementing methods defined in a protocol (like "keyDown" or "insertTab") or by implementing delegate methods ("windowWillClose"). Sometimes you also have to listen for notifications from NotificationCenter.
> What is the right way to persist user configuration?
NSUserDefaults for everything that can be serialised into a number/string/dictionary easily, and the application support directory for anything you want to store in files.
SwiftUI is new future according to Apple, easy to start, but also unpolished compared to Cocoa. Cocoa is old and polished, but maybe eventually a legacy technology. I'm personally still in Cocoa world, but parts of SwiftUI are interesting.
I expect SwiftUI to stay pretty high-level so don’t expect nitty gritty details. But Apple seems to be putting a lot of effort there so you might want to check it out.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technologies
There are dozens of entrypoints depending on the framework (e.g. SwiftUI, Cocoa, CoreFoundation etc. ) , Platform & Application you are interested in .
I recommend starting with an application in mind (e.g. a MenuBar Utility, Notification Bar Widget, Standalone App, CLI utility, etc) and then digging through Apple's own framework documentation .
That will give you the e2e experience covering all the tools & frameworks needed to finish the task. Then repeat with a more complicated app or one in a different domain.
The Apple-provided documentation assumes you already know many of the ins and outs of C/C++ build arcana, and on top of that does a terrible job of explaining what parts XCode adds or subtracts to the process. I never came across a resource for this information that was even passable, and wound up getting most of my answers from IRC.
Despite the name, it’s quite fast to get through.
Apple also has really great videos on life cycles etc https://developer.apple.com/wwdc21/10022 that go over the underpinnings
Why this instead of a book? MacOS X UI is the result of many years of experiment and technologies. Going over the historical view gave me time to build a mental framework to work on instead of pushing things as they are today. MacOS is also changing so much that the documentation gap only gets worse with time.
Storyboards, SwiftUI, iOS, UIKit are noisy in that sense because they solve problems that you might not understand from the get go.
Understanding Objective-C is also crucial because besides SwiftUI, the backbone was made with Objective-C characteristics in mind. But this one I don’t have good references for besides Smalltalk books and Clang documentation.
[1] http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/NeXTStep/3.3/nd/
Once you grok iOS, you'll be at home with macOS since they follow the same patterns.
Stick with storyboards, don't bother with SwiftUI (no, really, don't do it) and try to use as much default out of the box behaviour as possible, instead of wondering 'how do I do that X thing I did on platform Y'.
It's filled with the specific type of knowledge you're looking for.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
My advice is don't be attracted by the shiny toy that is SwiftUI. It's a steaming pile to dung, unless you just want some basic forms/tables/text.
If you want to go for the typical macOS look & feel stick with AppKit.
Resources: barely any
Apparently you’re either not interested in macOS development or you’re way too experienced to need help.
Usually a good primer for any topic you want to dive into.
https://www.udemy.com/course/professional-macos-programming/