How do you write program for Mac OS X?

Question

Hi just wondering how do you start writing programs for MAC OS X?

what language does it use? can I use objective C? which IDE do I use? any licensing fee should I know about.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Objective-C + Cocoa

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjectiveC/Introduction/introObjectiveC.html

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CocoaFundamentals/Introduction/Introduction.html

Apple suggests XCode

Answer 2

Xcode is the apple supplied IDE, and without external libraries some objective C is always required to build applications.

That being said xcode supports multiple types of langauges, and has extensions for many more - and C++ can be spliced in with objective C code - so if you prefer to code in C++ you can write a quick objective C wrapper and do all your own stuff in C++ - or indeed the langauge of your choice. There are a few other open source IDE's but I don't really recommend them - most of them crash on opening in new versions of Mac OS X.

Xcode is found in the developer package on your second mac install disk, or the latest version (with iphone SDK's) can be downloaded once registering on the Apple Developer Website, which you can become a basic member of for free.

As far as licensing goes, unless you plan to make a game for iOS there are no liscensing fees, unless you want a full subscription to apples developer website, which gives you a few extra things from them.

If your trying to write a game, consider using the SDL library, a cross platform wrapper for whole lot of operating system interface functions, including graphics - or you can use it as I do in combination with OpenGL for full 3D Support, hardware acceleration, ect.

Answer 3

Mac OS X is a great programming platform, as such you can use just about any language you like.

If you wish to write native applications using the Cocoa framework you'll probably want to be using Objective-C. You can download XCode as an IDE for free.

No licensing fees.

Answer 4

This answer might help.

Answer 5

The native libraryfor OS X developed by Apple are called Cocoa. It provides OS X's graphical user interface, and other libraries such as Core Data for database acess, Core Animation for fast easy animation and video features in your software. These libraries are written in a mixture of C and Objective C (which is an extension of the C language). For best performance and best integration with the Mac operating system you should probaby look at developing in C, Objective C and perhaps some C++ as well.

There are some add-on layers that provide acces to the Cocoa libraries from other languages such as Ruby or Python. These are generaly of good quality and work well, so you can use these languages if your aplication does not need the very best performance. They are generaly considered to be easier to learn than the C family of languages and you can become productive very quickly.

Beyond that, you can use languages and toolkits that are platform-independent so your software will can run on Linux or Windows as well as the Mac. For example Python comes with a simple built-in GUI toolkit called Tkinter. You can use more powerful cross-platform toolkits such as Qt or WxWidgets with C or C++ but have excellent bindings for Ruby, Python and other langauges. This is an approach I am using of a project, with Python and Qt.

Others have mentioned Apple's integrated development environemnt (IDE) called XCode. I have only toyed with it, but it looks very powerful for true native development of Cocoa applications.