Cocoa Tutorials

1. Listing of files in a tar file in Mac OS X.

By: Margaret : 2010-09-24

Description: The zipinfo tool gives a listing of files in a zip file. You can get a similar listing for tar files by using the command line tar:


2. Listing of files in a zip file in Mac OS X.

By: Margaret : 2010-09-24

Description: You can use the /usr/bin/zipinfo tool for looking at the contents of a zip file. Find a zip file on your machine, and try running zipinfo in the Terminal like this (-1 is dash-one, not dash-el):


3. Multithreading versus Multiprocessing in Mac OS X.

By: Aaron Hillegass : 2010-09-24

Description: Multithreading gets a lot of hype because it enables you to take advantage of multiple processors and cores. Multithreading can also ensure that your application stays responsive while it is doing some sort of processing in the background. Multithreaded programming is, however, difficult: The activities of one thread often stomp on the data being used by another.


4. Using NSOpenGLView in Cocoa Programming in Mac

By: Aaron Hillegass : 2010-09-24

Description: NSOpenGLView is an NSView subclass that has an OpenGL drawing context. Just as you needed the focus locked on a view to do drawing with Quartz, so the OpenGL drawing context must be active for any OpenGL drawing commands to have an effect.


5. Garbage Collector in Cocoa Programming in Mac

By: Aaron Hillegass : 2010-09-24

Description: As long as you use only Objective-C objects, the garbage collector will do exactly what you want, without your needing to think about it. However, as soon as you start to malloc C data types and Core Foundation structures, you will need to be a bit more circumspect.


6. Weak References in Mac Cocoa Programming

By: Aaron Hillegass : 2010-09-24

Description: Sometimes, you will want to have an object pointer that should point to that object as long as it exists, but you do not want that pointer to prevent the garbage collector from deallocating the object. In this case, you can use a weak reference


7. Web Services in Mac Cocoa Programming

By: Aaron Hillegass : 2010-09-24

Description: Web services are simply an HTTP request and response whereby each may be carrying XML data. So using a Web service from Cocoa is simply a matter of being able to send HTTP requests and receive responses. It also may require generating and parsing XML.


8. Printing in Mac Cocoa Programming

By: Aaron Hillegass : 2010-09-24

Description: Compared to most operating systems, Mac OS X makes writing print routines considerably easier. After all, your views already know how to generate PDF, and Mac OS X knows how to print PDF. If you have a document-based application and a view that knows how to draw itself, you simply implement printOperationWithSettings:error:. In this method, you create an NSPrintOperation object using a view and return it. The code, in your NSDocument subclass, would look like this


9. Tools for Cocoa Programming

By: Aaron Hillegass : 2010-09-03

Description: All the tools for Cocoa development come as part of the Mac OS X Developer Tools, and you get them for free with Mac OS X. Although the developer tools will add about a dozen handy applications to your system, you will use primarily two applications: Xcode and Interface Builder. Behind the scenes, the GNU C compiler (gcc) will be used to compile your code, and the GNU debug


10. What is Cocoa? A brief history of Cocoa.

By: Aaron Hillegass : 2010-09-03

Description: The story of Cocoa starts with a delightful bit of history. Once upon a time, two guys named Steve started a company called Apple Computer in their garage. The company grew rapidly, so they hired an experienced executive named John Sculley to be its CEO. After a few conflicts, John Sculley moved Steve Jobs to a position in which he had no control over the company at all. Steve Jobs left to form another computer company, called NeXT Computer.