The most bang for your buck is to watch the latest WWDC videos. Use SwiftUI to hit the road and fill the gaps later. Declarative UI is too powerful and removes a lot of the excuses people had before in UI development. There’s different technologies you’re going to encounter that are the same as Windows-land, but has the Apple branding.
Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?
31–40 of 91 posts
Re: Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?
#32shamelessly off-topic but if anyone here is already good at Objective-C development for macOS and looking for remote work, please drop us a line at: jobs@corecode.io
Re: Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?
#33[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?
#34Here’s a tutorial from Apple on creating a Mac app with the latest declarative framework: https://developer.apple.com/tutorials/swiftui/creating-a-mac....
Re: Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?
#35Highly recommend beginning with Swift and using SwiftUI for UI development. Dive into AppKit and Obj-C when (if) necessary. As an additional companion, check out the HIG [1] or Human Interface Guidelines. It's a great starting point for introducing a feature "the Apple way", and it'll make knowing what to reach for in SwiftUI much more straight forward.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Re: Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?
#36If you're not writing command line programs (99% of what I do) I suggest adopting SwiftUI for your interface. 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 w…
What sort of complex things are they unable to do? Is there any recourse? Can you use SwiftUI for the majority and dip into something lower level when needed?
Was looking at making something that would interact with SystemConfiguration.framework and registers itself on the DynamicStore's callback (something akin to dns-heaven[1]). From the introductory tutorials included with xcode I have no idea what is the equivalent to applicationDidFinishLaunching() where this kind of things would be put.
It looked like maybe BackgroundTask is what I'm looking for, but it seems arbitrarily limited on macOS to an urlsession, whatever that is ?
Re: Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?
#37Do a little iOS dev since that has 100x more learning resources. 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'.
Storyboards are slow compared to Live Preview, and lead beginners to adopt bad patterns like Massive View Controllers rather than composable/testable SwiftUI components. Not to mention its horrendous XML format.
Re: Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?
#38"I am looking for explanations that will help me build a conceptual understanding of macos UI development." 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…
+1 as well. This helped me finally build my first app, and things learned translated very easily between apple platforms. Although, I don’t agree with dismissing Electron. It’s what I eventually pivoted to in order to create a desktop software business. For me, electron is the best of all worlds, literally.
Re: Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?
#39Apple's Own Developer Documentation is Exceptional ranging from Cookbook-style guides to Reference Documentation. 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,…
The old docs that explain the fundamental concepts about the frameworks are also still available. I prefer them to the current crop of docs because they go deeper conceptually and are more information dense.
It requires a little bit of effort to extract and use them. This tweet is what got me in the right direction:
Re: Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?
#40Apple's Own Developer Documentation is Exceptional ranging from Cookbook-style guides to Reference Documentation. 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,…
The old docs that explain the fundamental concepts about the frameworks are also still available. I prefer them to the current crop of docs because they go deeper conceptually and are more information dense. It requires a little bit of effort to extract and use them. This tweet is what got me in the right direction: https://twitter.com/dmartincy/status/1393629254227832838
I totally agree – here is the legacy archive search engine