macOS by Tutorials

If you've always wanted to write your own native macOS apps, this is the book for you! Learn to build beautiful and functional native apps. By Sarah Reichelt.

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Who is this for?

This book is for developers with some experience developing for iOS and who are familiar with Swift, Xcode and SwiftUI.

Covered concepts

Building windowed apps
Building menu bar apps
Building document-based apps
Enabling automation
Distributing macOS apps

Kodeco is no longer updating this book, but you can find new editions of macOS by Tutorials at https://troz.net/books/macos_tutorials.

macOS by Tutorials is a series of epic-length tutorials where you’ll learn to build four complete native macOS apps! Each app explores a different style of interface and takes you...

Before You Begin

This section tells you a few things you need to know before you get started, such as what you’ll need for hardware and software, where to find the project files for this book, and more.

What You Need

Book Source Code & Forums

iii

Dedications

About the Team

Introduction

Section I: Your First App: On This Day

Begin your journey developing for macOS by building a full-featured app using SwiftUI. The app, On This Day, accesses a public network API to collect information about events, births and deaths for a given date. Along the way, you’ll learn how to manage multiple windows, add menu and toolbar commands and choose multiple display options. You’ll experience first-hand the power of SwiftUI and see just how easy it is to build an app that has all of the look and feel you expect in a macOS app.

Designing the Data Model

Starting with the source of the data, design the data models that will drive the SwiftUI user interface.

Working With Windows

Create the main window to display the data models designed in the previous chapter. Style the events into a grid layout.

Adding Menus & Toolbars

Add menus and menu items to the Mac menu bar and add a toolbar to your windows. Make the grid searchable and the toolbar customizable.

Using Tables & Custom Views

Add a table as a different way of displaying the data. Create a custom date picker to show events from other dates.

Setting Preferences & Icons

Now that the app is functionally complete, it's time to add the finishing touches: a Preferences window, an app icon and an About box.

Why Write a macOS App?

Now that you've created your first native macOS app, what makes it better than the other possible technology choices? What are the alternatives?

Section II: Building a Menu Bar App

In this section, you’ll use AppKit to build a Pomodoro-style time tracking app that lives only in the macOS menu bar. Along the way, you’ll learn how to manage timers, update the menu in real-time, and integrate a SwiftUI view into an AppKit app. You’ll also learn about how macOS “sandboxes” apps to protect both them and the system itself.

Using the Menu Bar for an App

Use AppKit to create an app that runs in the menu bar. Use a custom view to display menu items.

Working with Timers, Alerts & Notifications

Control your menu bar app. Set up a timer to countdown the tasks. Update the menu bar and menu items as required. Interact with the user via alerts or notifications.

Adding Your Own Tasks

Learn how to save and load data files, use SwiftUI in an AppKit app and deal with the Mac sandbox.

Section III: Building a Document-based App

In this section, you’ll return to using SwiftUI and explore how to build a document-based app. You’ll create a Markdown editor — there can never be enough Markdown editors in the world! — that allows you to preview your text in real time. Along the way, you’ll add menu commands to change the styling of the preview and add formatting to your Markdown text.

Creating A Document-Based App

Create a document-based app using SwiftUI. Use an AppKit view in a SwiftUI app. Learn about macOS file types while building a Markdown editor.

Adding Menu Controls

Add menu controls to your app. Some will adjust app-wide settings, others will focus on the active window. Open a secondary window from a menu item.

Section IV: Advanced Wizardry

Because macOS has its roots in Unix, it provides a vast array of command line tools which allow power users to perform tasks ranging from system management to image manipulation. In this section, you’ll learn how to build a graphical front-end for one such command: sips. Once you’ve built your sips GUI, you’ll enable automation to allow your new command to appear in the Services menu and Shortcuts app. When you complete this section, you, too, will be a wizard!

Diving Deeper Into Your Mac

Learn about using Terminal to run commands. Use a Swift playground to explore using commands from within an app. Start using an image processing command.

Adding the Interface

Set up a SwiftUI app to act as a user interface to the sips Terminal commands. Use file handling and drag & drop to manage image files and folders.

Automation for Your App

Your app automates complex processes, but now you'll learn how to publish Services and Shortcut intents so other automations can access these parts of your app.

Section V: Distributing Your macOS Apps

Once you’ve written your app, you’ll want to distribute it to others so they can benefit from your creativity. On macOS, you have more distribution options than you do on iOS. In this section, you’ll explore the pros and cons of those options so you can choose which is best for you.

Using the Mac App Store

Now that you've built some apps, you want to distribute them. In this chapter, you'll learn how to upload, test and release through the Mac App Store.

Distributing Externally

You can also distribute your apps outside the Mac App Store. Bundle your app, get it notarized by Apple and package it for distribution.

Conclusion