This document is the starting point for learning how to create Mac apps. It contains fundamental information about the OS X environment and how your apps interact with that environment. It also contains important information about the architecture of Mac apps and tips for designing key parts of your app.
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At a Glance
Cocoa is the application environment that unlocks the full power of OS X. Cocoa provides APIs, libraries, and runtimes that help you create fast, exciting apps that automatically inherit the beautiful look and feel of OS X, as well as standard behaviors users expect.
Cocoa Helps You Create Great Apps for OS X
You write apps for OS X using Cocoa, which provides a significant amount of infrastructure for your program. Fundamental design patterns are used throughout Cocoa to enable your app to interface seamlessly with subsystem frameworks, and core application objects provide key behaviors to support simplicity and extensibility in app architecture. Key parts of the Cocoa environment are designed particularly to support ease of use, one of the most important aspects of successful Mac apps. Many apps should adopt iCloud to provide a more coherent user experience by eliminating the need to synchronize data explicitly between devices.
Relevant Chapters:The Mac Application Environment, The Core App Design, and Integrating iCloud Support Into Your App
Common Behaviors Make Apps Complete
During the design phase of creating your app, you need to think about how to implement certain features that users expect in well-formed Mac apps. Integrating these features into your app architecture can have an impact on the user experience: accessibility, preferences, Spotlight, services, resolution independence, fast user switching, and the Dock. Enabling your app to assume full-screen mode, taking over the entire screen, provides users with a more immersive, cinematic experience and enables them to concentrate fully on their content without distractions.
Design App For Macbook Air
Relevant Chapters:Supporting Common App Behaviors and Implementing the Full-Screen Experience
Get It Right: Meet System and App Store Requirements
Configuring your app properly is an important part of the development process. Mac apps use a structured directory called a bundle to manage their code and resource files. And although most of the files are custom and exist to support your app, some are required by the system or the App Store and must be configured properly. The application bundle also contains the resources you need to provide to internationalize your app to support multiple languages.
Finish Your App with Performance Tuning
As you develop your app and your project code stabilizes, you can begin performance tuning. Of course, you want your app to launch and respond to the user’s commands as quickly as possible. A responsive app fits easily into the user’s workflow and gives an impression of being well crafted. You can improve the performance of your app by speeding up launch time and decreasing your app’s code footprint.
Relevant Chapter:Tuning for Performance and Responsiveness
How to Use This Document
This guide introduces you to the most important technologies that go into writing an app. In this guide you will see the whole landscape of what's needed to write one. That is, this guide shows you all the 'pieces' you need and how they fit together. There are important aspects of app design that this guide does not cover, such as user interface design. However, this guide includes many links to other documents that provide details about the technologies it introduces, as well as links to tutorials that provide a hands-on approach.
In addition, this guide emphasizes certain technologies introduced in OS X v10.7, which provide essential capabilities that set your app apart from older ones and give it remarkable ease of use, bringing some of the best features from iOS to OS X.
See Also
The following documents provide additional information about designing Mac apps, as well as more details about topics covered in this document:
- To work through a tutorial showing you how to create a Cocoa app, see Start Developing Mac Apps Today.
- For information about user interface design enabling you to create effective apps using OS X, see OS X Human Interface Guidelines.
- To understand how to create an explicit app ID, create provisioning profiles, and enable the correct entitlements for your application, so you can sell your application through the Mac App Store or use iCloud storage, see App Distribution Guide.
- For a general survey of OS X technologies, see Mac Technology Overview.
- To understand how to implement a document-based app, see Document-Based App Programming Guide for Mac.
Copyright © 2015 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Updated: 2015-03-09
Native Mac apps built with Mac Catalyst can share code with your iPad apps, and you can add more features just for Mac. In macOS Big Sur, you can create even more powerful versions of your apps and take advantage of every pixel on the screen by running them at native Mac resolution. Apps built with Mac Catalyst can now be fully controlled using just the keyboard, access more iOS frameworks, and take advantage of the all-new look of macOS Big Sur. There’s never been a better time to turn your iPad app into a powerful Mac app.
Designed for macOS Big Sur.
When an app built with Mac Catalyst runs on macOS Big Sur, it automatically adopts the new design. The new Maps and Messages apps were built with the latest version of Mac Catalyst.
Get a head start on your native Mac app.
Your iPad app can be made into an excellent Mac app. Now’s the perfect time to bring your app to life on Mac. The latest version of Xcode 12 is all you need. Begin by selecting the “Mac” checkbox in the project settings of your existing iPad app to create a native Mac app that you can enhance further. Your Mac and iPad apps share the same project and source code, making it easy to make changes in one place.
Optimize your interface for Mac.
Your newly created Mac app runs natively, utilizing the same frameworks, resources, and runtime environment as apps built just for Mac. Fundamental Mac desktop and windowing features are added, and touch controls are adapted to the keyboard and mouse. By default, your app will scale to match the iPad’s resolution. On macOS Big Sur, you can choose “Optimize interface for Mac” to use the Mac idiom, running your app using the native resolution on Mac. This gives you full control of every pixel on the screen and allows your app to adopt more controls specific to Mac, such as pull-down menus and checkboxes.
Even more powerful.
The new APIs and behaviors in macOS Big Sur let you create even more powerful Mac apps. Apps can now be fully controlled using just the keyboard. You can create out-of-window and detachable popovers, control window tabbing using new window APIs, and make it easier for users to select photos in your app by using the updated Photos picker. iOS Photos editing extensions can now be built to run on Mac. And your app is even easier to manage when it’s running in the background with improved app lifecycle APIs.
New and updated frameworks.
Mac Catalyst adds support for new and updated frameworks to extend what your apps can do on Mac. HomeKit support means home automation apps can run alongside the Home app on Mac. The addition of the ClassKit framework lets Mac apps track assignments and share progress with teachers and students. Plus, there are updates to many existing frameworks, including Accounts, Contacts, Core Audio, GameKit, MediaPlayer, PassKit, and StoreKit.
Tools and resources.
Design App For Macbook Pro
Download Xcode 12 beta and use these resources to build native Mac apps with Mac Catalyst.