IPhone Design for Mac

Question

I am an iPhone developer and know this structure well. From the Mac App Store to the brink, I would like to learn more about the development of the Mac. Are there any good manuals / tutorial / etc. help with the transition? I looked around and did not find much. Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

You need to know the difference between UIKit and AppKit . ( Foundation and Core Foundation same on both platforms.) They are slightly different from each other; there are more frameworks that ship with OS X than with iOS; a structure with the same name may have more functionality in OS X, etc.

But basically this is if you are distributing the application through the Mac App Store, because you do not need to learn how to pack things yourself.

Cocoa's best programming book for Mac is this , but it might be too basic for an experienced iOS programmer. But this is still a good book.

I think we will see a stream of books for people like you, showing the development path of Mac to competent iPhone programmers; but this has not happened yet. Perhaps you can write one from your own experience :)

Answer 2

Moving the other way, I found that the skills that are being transferred are just low-level material such as Objective-C, Foundation, and Core Foundation, and the tools are the same.

Also, many low-level concepts are the same. There are more tasks and activities, IBOutlets and IBActions. However, at a higher level, everything is very different. There is, for example, a table view, but you tend to use it differently and only when the actual table is required, and not as the basis for the entire GUI idiom. In addition, table views have more than one column.

There are many advantages, for example, you have much more freedom in what your user interface will look like. And you use garbage collection. With GC, everything you learn about Cocoa's memory management becomes instantly redundant. It is very liberating.