How to get started building a Mac application.

Question

I am a Python/web programmer.

Now, I would like to transition to building applications for the Mac.
Please tell me--what do I have to learn to get started? What books would you recommend?

Answer 1

The programming language of choice for building OS X gui applications is Objective-C with Cocoa, I would recommend that you check out some books on that. There are python bindings for Cocoa but they are not optimal.

You should check out previous questions looking for books on Obj-C and Cocoa.

Answer 2

Assuming that you included the "python" tag after considering that it will be interpreted as applying to the question and not the questioner, you must be interested in writing Python applications for the Mac, right? After all, you didn't include "web" as one of the tags too.

If that's true, I'm not sure what more you need to know already, other than perhaps picking a GUI framework, if you want to write GUI applications.

I use wxPython quite successfully for applications which run on OS X (and Windows). Very few Mac-specific issues have cropped up to cause trouble, primarily because both Python and wxPython are remarkably cross-platform. The few that have come up are by and large documented and have known workarounds, or the resolution is fairly simple to find.

I've needed no books on the subject, and really know very little about Macs. It really hasn't been a problem so far.