Mac OS X Development Notes

Recently I've finally started learning how to develop applications for Mac OS X, or macOS as Apple likes to call it these days. I want to get a good idea of how Cocoa applications actually work, so I'm learning Objective-C before diving into Swift. I'm basing my learning heavily on the book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X.

As the years passed, many common design patterns in OS X applications started emerging, this should provide resources on how to use them.

Many applications in OS X have an NSTableView with +/- buttons in a toolbar at its bottom. This provides a sleek design solution to a problem: How to I provide users a way to add new items to a list? With this approach you just let the user click the + button and a new entry is created and ready to be edited.

The way to create this element is by utilizing the NSSegmentedControl component. A great tutorial on how to do this is available on StackOverflow: NSTableView with +/- buttons like in System Preferences using only Interface Builder.

Here is a collection of great resources on old Mac OS X programming:

• Developing for Tiger and Leopard / PowerPC (a devlog)