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Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?

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Re: Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?

#71
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second this. Apple's official documentation, while suffering from a decrease in quality over the last decade, is still as good as any "tutorial" you'll find.

I find that you have to find the right bit of documentation, which is not always easy on Apple's site. I often find API documentation that doesn't have enough info to just start using it (it's great for reference, though). You need to find the long-form descriptive documentation they have, which isn't always found by your favorite search engine. (And Apple keeps rearranging their documentation meaning that once you h…

Agreed. The “guides” are great. The API docs are not.

Re: Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?

#74
post #73

The other responses have some great answers, but I learn best by breaking something that is already working, and so this list may have useful sources of code to poke around in: https://github.com/serhii-londar/open-source-mac-os-apps

That list is an invaluable resource, but it's huge and a bit daunting.

If you're interested but not sure which project to start with, I recommend looking at NetNewsWire[1]. It's a very nice codebase with experienced Mac and iOS developers on the team. It's cross platform (iOS, macOS, ipadOS), uses the latest technologies, and has speed and stability as design priorities.

It's the opposite of an Electron wrapper around a web app.

[1] https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire

Re: Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?

#75
post #7

I would suggest Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X , even though it's based on Objective-C and the book is old. That means it's based upon older versions of Xcode and Mac OS (like ~10 years old). Conceptually it's a good book, but because of it's age the code examples, etc are outdated. The publisher does have forums which can be helpful: https://forums.bignerdranch.com/c/cocoa-programming-for-os-x... They also have a Sw…

> based upon older versions of Xcode and Mac OS (like ~10 years old).

More crucially, I'd be curious what people's thoughts are on why the MacOS development community doesn't have newer resources like this.

Re: Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?

#76
post #57

Just do it. 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…

Swift interops with C directly so there’s no need to wrap in Objective-C.

Re: Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?

#77
There is a lot of excellent documentation on Apple's website, but it's all in the “documentation archive” and is at least five years out of date. Please read it anyway! There's great conceptual introductions to every topic you could imagine in there.
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