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Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?
Almost 25 years ago before I went down the rabbit hole of backend programming - I did some windows app development. I want to get into macOS programming now (I have been using a mac for the past 5 years and want to get to a place where I can build some hobby apps - I don't need to make money - I just need the damn machine to do what I want it to) - but I am having difficulty figuring out the right resources.
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.
- innocentoldguy 4y agoI found Paul Hudson's "Hacking with Swift" products quite useful. https://www.hackingwithswift.com https://www.hackingwithswift.com
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y agoThere 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of excellent documentation on Apple's website, but it's all in the “documentation archive” and is at least five years out of date.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.
- alvivanco 4y agoI found this course with great ratings while browsing on Udemy this weekend: https://www.udemy.com/course/professional-macos-programming/ https://www.udemy.com/course/professional-macos-programming/
- andrewmcwatters 4y agoApple Developer Documentation Archive. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/navigation/ https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/navigation/ It's filled with the specific type of knowledge you're looking for.
- marpstar 4y agoI 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.
- thewebcount 4y agoI 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 have found it, if you don't bookmark it, finding it again can be nearly impossible.)
- marpstar 4y agoAgreed. The “guides” are great. The API docs are not.
- duped 4y agoIt's four years out of date and missing the information OP would need for writing apps today.
- andrewmcwatters 4y agoThere are articles in there that don’t go “out of date.”
- jessegrosjean 4y agoOne thing to decide maybe before specific books is if you want to do SwiftUI programming or more traditional Cocoa programming. They both have advantages, and they can be mixed, but if you are just learning probably best to focus on one approach to start. 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.
- bluedino 4y agoI 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-5th-edition/9 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. https://bignerdranch.com/books/ https://bignerdranch.com/books/
- Aqua_Geek 4y agoI would second this recommendation. This book is how I originally learned Objective-C and macOS development 20 years ago. It walks you through the fundamentals and provides a very good foundation for digesting the (archived) documentation from Apple.
- KerrAvon 4y agoThis is the best answer for hobby Mac programming for AppKit in Objective-C. As others have said, SwiftUI is the future and you might want to instead look at that if you can find a decent guide to it -- a lot of what's on the web is very badly obsolete already. It's a very different model. Folks, there will come a point where new UI features don't ship anymore for AppKit. Telling people not to learn SwiftUI is extremely counterproductive.
- newaccount74 4y agoSwiftUI is not usable yet on the Mac. I can't talk about its state on iOS, but on the Mac you will run into deal breaking limitations even for the most basic apps. If you want to make Mac apps, learn AppKit. You can use AppKit from Swift just fine, there's no need to use Objective C. Some of the text APIs are a bit cumbersome to use with Swift because of the different string semantics, but for the most part writing AppKit code in Swift is pretty sweet.
- 4y ago
- satysin 4y agoPaul Hudson has a decent book on macOS programming using SwiftUI and AppKit. It isn't perfect but it is a decent place to start https://www.hackingwithswift.com/store/hacking-with-macos https://www.hackingwithswift.com/store/hacking-with-macos
- danpalmer 4y agoIs it as in depth as OP appears to be looking for? I've found Paul's content to be good for quick references to high level concepts, and brief how-tos for beginners, but I've not found it to be good for deeper explorations. That said, I haven't read this book, only his free content.
- satysin 4y agoGood question. It, like all of Paul's books, is more of a series of tutorials than a reference. I would say it is a decent place to learn how to get started with macOS app developing using either SwiftUI or AppKit. For somebody with no knowledge of macOS app development it will put you in a good position to be able to work from Apple's documentation and further learn the platform. However it is not anywhere near as in depth as something like Petzold's Windows programming books. Although it isn't meant to be anything like Petzold's books so comparing is kinda pointless anyway :) I bought Paul's books in a decent value (to me) sale a few years ago and I rate them quite highly overall. Much higher than most other self-published programming books.
- danpalmer 4y agoTo get started, I'd Protocol Oriented Programming from WWDC. Not a tutorial or how-to, but more of a look into the philosophy behind Swift. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2015/408/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2015/408/
- saagarjha 4y agoAh yes, the video that launched a thousand unnecessary abstractions ;) It’s a good exercise to expand your horizons on how you might approach architecting your app but in general the answer to the question of “do I need a protocol here” will still be “no”.
- alexashka 4y agoDo 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'.
- programmarchy 4y agoStoryboards 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.
- tl 4y ago> Storyboards are slow compared to Live Preview Citation needed. Even on Apple silicon, I'm not even sure Live Preview can crash faster than Interface Builder and it has no shortage of practice. > lead beginners to adopt bad patterns like Massive View Controllers rather than composable/testable SwiftUI components There is no requirement at all on how big a storyboard is and allowing things to occupy the same *.storyboard where they would have to separate XIB files is an imporvement where it is useful. > Not to mention its horrendous XML format Where it does not come at other costs, standard formats (XML) are easier to operate with external tools over bespoke formats (turing complete Obj-C or Swift code). The properties in those files were more numerous than their SwiftUI counterparts, but they served a purpose. Working with SwiftUI and the bonanza of implied default behaviors required to achieve its terseness add new salience to the idea "it is better to be explicit than implicit".
- programmarchy 4y agoGo where the puck is going, not where it’s been. It’s obvious that Apple is heavily investing in SwiftUI to implement their vision for multiplatform app support. Did you see a single storyboard in WWDC22? 21? SwiftUI examples were ubiquitous. You can argue for Storyboards until you’re blue in the face, but they are destined for the dustbin.
- _han 4y agoI recently did the SwiftUI tutorials that had a chapter on macOS (from the context of adding macOS as a target alongside iOS). https://developer.apple.com/tutorials/swiftui https://developer.apple.com/tutorials/swiftui 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.
- gumby 4y agoIf 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 will let you do the basic stuff easily...and likely just (well, almost just) recompile your program for your iphone or ipad.
- mostlysimilar 4y agoWhat 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?
- c-fe 4y agoTo give a quick example: in swiftui for ios, you can not change the spacing between list sections
- kitsunesoba 4y agoSwiftUI's weakness on macOS and to a lesser degree iOS is that it's difficult to fine-tune things to the extent that many longtime Apple platform devs traditionally have. It can usually meet the base case but it makes honing in on the fine details and achieving a high level of polish cumbersome. There's also some things, particularly on macOS, that you're going to need to drop down into AppKit to do, which is possible thanks to NSViewRepresentable/UIViewRepresentable, but a bit frustrating is necessary. Personally speaking I'm still limiting usage of SwiftUI to views that are either simple or don't have much in the way of user interaction. It's decent at that, but for most other things I'm using plain old AppKit/UIKit. SwiftUI is still green compared to AppKit/UIKit's multi-decade legacy, so hopefully it will improve in the coming years.
- meroje 4y agoWas 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 ? [1]: https://github.com/greenboxal/dns-heaven/ https://github.com/greenboxal/dns-heaven/
- streblo 4y agoIn a past life I spent a lot of time developing for iOS, and the one incredibly sore spots in terms of documentation was the build process. Particularly, what are all the things I need to know to effectively build my app, and debug the process. 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.
- mysticllama 4y ago"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 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 :) https://cs193p.sites.stanford.edu/ https://cs193p.sites.stanford.edu/
- the_gastropod 4y ago+1. I just finished up going through this course, and found it very well-taught. Bonus points, the projects are actually pretty fun and cover quite a lot of ground.
- semireg 4y ago+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.
- daveidol 4y ago> For me, electron is the best of all worlds, literally Sure, but it does have tradeoffs to the end user around bloat/performance. Not worth dismissing, but also not always the clear winner.
- semireg 4y agoEmphasis on “for me” aka, the indie developer, and in terms of sales (a measure of value) for this particular use case, electron was the foundational enabling technology.
- 4y ago
- pejrich 4y agoI'm just finshing up my first macOS app. I went with SwiftUI because I was new and didn't want to learn an "old" tech. The reality is outside of very basic stuff, SwiftUI is not capable of doing a lot of stuff, so I ended up have to learn not only AppKit as well, but how to fuse AppKit into SwiftUI and fuse SwiftUI into AppKit. 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.
- nocsi 4y agoIt’s probably more productive to mention what about SwiftUI is a “steaming pile of dung”. For most mobile UI, you can spit out a working design faster than w/ AppKit. It doesn’t even have to be one or the other, you can meld both. What’s the value in talking about SwiftUI being incapable when you don’t mention what you can’t do in it.
- saagarjha 4y agoIt doesn’t support a lot of what you can do in AppKit at the moment. There are also many bugs in it where it will throw asserts or stop working or draw incorrectly.
- dinkblam 4y agoshamelessly 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
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nocsi 4y agoThe 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.
- tonymet 4y agoApple's Own Developer Documentation is Exceptional ranging from Cookbook-style guides to Reference Documentation. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technologies 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.
- tonymet 4y agoAlso seek out similar apps on Github, then "reverse engineer" those into frameworks and read Apple's documentation on the framework
- conceptdoxthrow 4y agoThe 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 https://twitter.com/dmartincy/status/1393629254227832838
- tonymet 4y agoI totally agree – here is the legacy archive search engine https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/navigation/ https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/navigation/
- conceptdoxthrow 4y agoNice! I didn't know this search UI still existed. Filtering by platform and typing "programming guide" returns all the good stuff.
- Austin_Conlon 4y agoHere’s a tutorial from Apple on creating a Mac app with the latest declarative framework: https://developer.apple.com/tutorials/swiftui/creating-a-macos-app https://developer.apple.com/tutorials/swiftui/creating-a-mac....
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- programmarchy 4y agoHighly 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-guidelines/guidelines/overview https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoI had great luck with the Big Nerd Ranch books[0]. 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. [0] https://bignerdranch.com/books/ https://bignerdranch.com/books/
- poulsbohemian 4y agoIt's really too bad there isn't a modern equivalent of the Inside Macintosh books. Those were amazing.
- dep_b 4y agoStarted a new app last year using Stotyboards and AppKit and haven’t regretted it for a second. I use SwiftUI on iOS devices on a daily basis and I don’t have to dip into UIKit very often anymore, but AppKit on macOS was always more mature than UIKit let alone SwiftUI. Plus SwiftUI still has rough spots on macOS. 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.
- gwbas1c 4y agoJust 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 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.
- fingerlocks 4y agoSwift interops with C directly so there’s no need to wrap in Objective-C.
- gwbas1c 4y agoI just skimmed an article about that. That's quite nice. FWIW: One of the things I really appreciated in Objective C was that I could use real C when working with a C library. It wasn't something I did often, though. But, IMO, it's definitely something that someone who wants to do low-level Mac programming should learn. Sometimes it's just easier to work with a library in C.
- newaccount74 4y agoI assume those questions are rhetorical, but let me try to answer them in a very terse form just so you have some terms to search the docs for. Assuming you want to use AppKit. > 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.
- devwastaken 4y agoBe aware any application you distribute must be signed now, or gatekeeper will not allow it to run. This means you must pay the $100 yearly apple developer fee, apple wants to make sure you're not economically disadvantaged. There are no exceptions even for students or open source. Only a licensed nonprofit may be able to waive it.
- lapcat 4y agoA couple years ago I wrote a blog post "Resources for learning Objective-C and AppKit". I wouldn't say it's comprehensive, but it may be useful. https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/learning.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/learning.html
- uhura 4y agoThis might not be a popular opinion but it was what worked for me: - Research a little about PostScript and the display version. - NextStep Developer Documentation [1] - Apple older documentation (it is archived, but covered a lot of stuff) 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/ http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/NeXTStep/3.3/nd/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bombcar 4y agoThe 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 https://github.com/serhii-londar/open-source-mac-os-apps
- sharkjacobs 4y agoThat 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 https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire
- bombcar 4y agoPerfect, you've provided exactly what I was fishing for - one of the list that was a quintessential perfect example of proper coding.
- rock3m 4y agoBuilding macOS apps is a lot easier with SwiftUI now. This book has quite a few good examples - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BP5P9H31 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BP5P9H31
- dagmx 4y agoI recommend starting with 100 days of SwiftUI. https://www.hackingwithswift.com/100/swiftui https://www.hackingwithswift.com/100/swiftui 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 https://developer.apple.com/wwdc21/10022 that go over the underpinnings
- airtonix 4y ago[dead]
- tooltitude 4y agoI found the books about Apple technologies by this collective to be very good: https://www.objc.io/ https://www.objc.io/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- not_me_ever 4y agoApple has tons of videos on their developer portal. https://developer.apple.com/videos/all-videos/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/all-videos/ Usually a good primer for any topic you want to dive into.