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+3  Q: 

Idiomatic, classy, open-source examples of Cocoa Interfaces?

Greetings, I'm currently learning Cocoa and Objective-C. I've run through "all" the tutorials and I'm fairly comfortable with the ObjC language. What I'm looking for now is to learn Cocoa idioms and see real code used in nice-looking Cocoa apps.

It seems like serious apps (iTunes, etc.) don't just drop in the IB elements. They do a lot more with code to tweak them to look good. (Example: the iTunes playlist drawer. How does one go about getting that styling?)

Here are some examples of nice UI's that are open source that I've found:

  • Smultron http: //tuppis.com/smultron/
  • Transmission http:// www.transmissionbt.com/
  • Vienna http:// www.vienna-rss.org/
  • Gitnub http:// wiki.github.com/Caged/gitnub

Any other suggestions on Open-Source apps that have great Cocoa user interfaces?

+10  A: 

You might want to look at BWToolkit, by Brandon Walkin. It's pretty awesome, containing an elegant collection of UI elements and other objects. The source code is provided so you can see how custom controls and views were created.

Brandon even provides some walkthrough movies, such as "Creating an iCal interface in 3 minutes."

A few other open source apps to dig into are Camino, Colloquy for both Mac and iPhone, Adium, and Quicksilver (lots of UI customization).

Sean Murphy  2009-05-21 17:51:15
Adium has a very nice interface, but the implementation is… hairy. Its biggest problem is poor separation between model and controller, manifesting mainly as too many controllers. I wouldn't recommend emulating that implementation.
Peter Hosey  2009-05-21 18:14:32

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