Cocoa Programming Developer's Handbook

by David Chisnall

Overview

The Cocoa programming environment—Apple’s powerful set of clean, object-oriented APIs—is increasingly becoming the basis of almost all contemporary Mac OS X development. With its long history of constant refinement and improvement, Cocoa has matured into a sophisticated programming environment that can make Mac OS X application development quick, efficient, and even fun.

 

Yet for all its refined elegance and ease of use, the staggering size of the Cocoa family of APIs and the vast magnitude of the official documentation can be intimidating to even seasoned programmers.

 

To help Mac OS X developers sort through and begin to put to practical use Cocoa’s vast array of tools and technologies, Cocoa Programming Developer’s Handbook provides a guided tour of the Cocoa APIs found on Mac OS X, thoroughly discussing—and showing in action—Cocoa’s core frameworks and other vital components, as well as calling attention to some of the more interesting but often overlooked parts of the APIs and tools. 

 

This book provides expert insight into a wide range of key topics, from user interface design to network programming and performance tuning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780321647948
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	12/29/2009
Series:	Developer's Library
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	936
File size:	37 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David Chisnall has in-depth knowledge of Cocoa as both an implementer and a developer. He is an active contributor to the GNUstep project, which provides an open source implementation of the Cocoa APIs, and cofounded the Étoilé project to build a desktop environment atop GNUstep. He has created a new Objective-C runtime library, worked on Objective-C support in the clang compiler, and published papers on Objective-C. He wrote a popular series of articles on Objective-C and Cocoa for informIT.com and is the author of The Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor (Addison-Wesley, 2008).

Table of Contents

 Part I: Introducing Cocoa

Chapter 1: Cocoa and Mac OS X
1.1 Understanding When to Use Cocoa
1.2 Understanding Cocoa's Role in Mac OS X
1.3 Overview
 
Chapter 2: Cocoa Language Options
2.1 Object Orientation
2.2 Objective-C
2.3 Ruby and Python
2.4 Summary
 
Chapter 3: Using Apple's Developer Tools
3.1 Obtaining Apple's Developer Tools
3.2 Interface Builder
3.3 XCode
3.4 Objective-C
3.5 Cocoa Conventions
3.6 Summary
 
Part II: The Cocoa Frameworks
 
Chapter 4: Foundation: The Objective-C Standard Library
4.1 General Concepts
4.2 Core Foundation Types
4.3 Basic Data Types
4.4 Collections
4.5 Enumeration
4.6 Property Lists
4.7 Interacting with the Filesystem
4.8 Notifications
4.9 Summary

Chapter 5: Application Concepts
5.1 Run Loops
5.2 Applications and Delegates
5.3 The Responder Chain
5.4 Run Loops in Applications
5.5 Delegates and Notifications
5.6 The View Hierarchy
5.7 Summary
 
Chapter 6: Creating Graphical User Interfaces
6.1 Positioning Views
6.2 Nested Views
6.3 Creating Views
6.4 Cocoa Bindings
6.5 Summary
 
Chapter 7: Windows and Menus
7.1 Understanding Windows
7.2 Creating Windows
7.3 Creating Window Objects
7.4 Panels
7.5 Sheets
7.6 Alert Dialogs
7.7 Menus
7.8 Summary  

Chapter 8: Text in Cocoa
8.1 Constructing and Deconstructing Strings
8.2 Annotating Strings
8.3 Localization
8.4 Text Storage
8.5 Understanding Fonts
8.6 Displaying Text
8.7 Writing a Custom Text Container
8.8 Using Multiple Text Views
8.9 Summary

Part III: Cocoa Documents

Chapter 9: Creating Document-Driven Applications
9.1 The Cocoa Document Model
9.2 Creating the Application Skeleton
9.3 Creating the Document
9.4 Extending the Outliner
9.5 Supporting Undo
9.6 Adding Undo to the Outliner
9.7 Summary

Chapter 10: Core Data
10.1 Introducing Data Modeling
10.2 Understanding Managed Objects
10.3 Attribute Types
10.4 Creating a Data Model
10.5 Choosing a Persistent Store
10.6 Storing Metadata
10.7 Automatic Undo
10.8 Core Data, Spotlight, and Time Machine
10.9 Summary  

Part IV: Complex User Interfaces

Chapter 11: Working with Structured Data
11.1 Data Sources and Delegates
11.2 Tables
11.3 Outline Views
11.4 Browsers
11.5 Collection Views
11.6 Customizing Views with New Cells
11.7 Creating Master-Detail Views
11.8 Summary
 

Chapter 12: Dynamic Views
12.1 Tabbed Views
12.2 Inspecting the View Hierarchy
12.3 Modifying the View Hierarchy
12.4 Creating Dynamic Input Forms
12.5 Full-Screen Applications
12.6 Summary

Part V: Advanced Graphics

Chapter 13: Custom Views
13.1 The Graphics Context
13.2 Core Graphics
13.3 AppKit Drawing
13.4 Printing and Paginating Views
13.5 Extending Interface Builder with Palettes
13.6 Summary
 
Chapter 14: Sound and Video
14.1 Beeping
14.2 Playing Simple Sounds
14.3 Understanding Cocoa Movie Objects
14.4 Adding Video
14.5 Editing Media
14.6 Low-Level Sound APIs
14.7 Sound and Video Recording
14.8 Supporting Speech
14.9 Cocoa Speech Synthesis
14.10 Conversing with Users
14.11 Summary  

Chapter 15: Advanced Visual Effects
15.1 Simple Animation
15.2 Core Animation Overview
15.3 Understanding Animation Concepts
15.4 Adding Simple Animations
15.5 Image Filters
15.6 Defining Transitions
15.7 Creating Complex Animations
15.8 3D Core Animation Transforms
15.9 OpenGL and Cocoa Views
15.10 Quartz Composer
15.11 Summary

Chapter 16: Supporting PDF and HTML
16.1 HTML in AppKit
16.2 Advanced HTML Support
16.3 Dynamic Interfaces with WebKit
16.4 PDF and Quartz
16.5 Displaying PDFs
16.6 Summary

Part VI: User Interface Integration 

Chapter 17: Searching and Filtering
17.1 Maintaining Document Indexes
17.2 Displaying Search Boxes
17.3 Searching for Documents
17.4 Spotlight
17.5 Predicates
17.6 Quick Look
17.7 Summary

Chapter 18: Contacts, Calendars, and Secrets
18.1 Address Book Overview
18.2 Getting Information About People
18.3 Searching the Address Book
18.4 Populating the "Me" vCard
18.5 Adding People to the Address Book
18.6 Storing Secrets
18.7 Calendars
18.8 Synchronizing Data
18.9 Summary

Chapter 19: Pasteboards
19.1 Pasteboard Overview
19.2 Pasteboard Types
19.3 Filtered Types
19.4 Property List Data
19.5 Self-Encoding Objects
19.6 Files and Pasteboards
19.7 Copy and Paste
19.8 Drag and Drop
19.9 Drag and Drop with Data Views
19.10 Summary

Chapter 20: Services
20.1 Example Services
20.2 An Evaluate Service
20.3 Using Services
20.4 Controlling the Services Menu
20.5 Filter Services
20.6 Summary
 
Chapter 21: Adding Scripting
21.1 Scripting Overview
21.2 Making Objects Scriptable
21.3 Scripting from Cocoa
21.4 Exposing Services to Automator
21.5 Other Scripting Technologies
21.6 Summary  

Part VII: System Programming

Chapter 22: Networking
22.1 Low-Level Socket Programming
22.2 Cocoa Streams
22.3 URL Handling
22.4 Bonjour
22.5 Distributed Objects
22.6 Summary

Chapter 23: Concurrency
23.1 Distributed Objects
23.2 Threading
23.3 Child Processes
23.4 Operation Queues
23.5 Grand Central Dispatch
23.6 OpenCL
23.7 Summary

Part VIII: Appendixes

Chapter 24: Portable Cocoa
24.1 NeXT and Sun
24.2 Mobile OS X on the iPhone
24.3 OpenStep and GNU
24.4 GNUstep
24.5 QuantumSTEP
24.6 Cocotron
24.7 GNUstepWeb and SOPE

Chapter 25: Advanced Tricks
25.1 The Preprocessor
25.2 Control Structures
25.3 Clean Code
25.4 Optimization
25.5 Cross-Platform Cocoa
25.6 The Runtime System