Differences in design targeting Apple products, especially iPhone

Question

Hi,

I'm thinking of starting to build software for Apple products, specifically the iPhone.

Having built software atop several platforms in the past - Linux/Unix, Android, .Net, Win32 - I know that every platform has a certain "way" of looking at it that makes building software for it simple.

For instance, Win32 communicates with an application mainly by sending messages that are usually read in a message pump loop while .Net raises events, and Android has intents that are sent to activities and intent-receivers. These are all similar concepts, but they have subtle differences that suggest, and sometime force, different design.

If you came to building Apple based software from a different platform, what were the key concepts that you found different? How were they different from what you knew? How did it affect the design of your software?

Thanks,
Asaf

Answer 1

I think that you will find OS X is very similar to everything else. Really the biggest hurdle for me was just Objective-C. From straight C++/Java it took me time to get it right. Well and Interface Builder too. I still prefer to code my interface "by hand". Events and such just clicked with what i knew from other languages.

Answer 2

You should take a look at Apple's documentation - Cocoa Design Patterns

The ones you use the most are target-action, delegate, categories, and of course MVC. Personally, I came over to Objective C and Cocoa from the Java world. The thing I found to be the most foreign were categories, but I had some knowledge of decorating a class as such from my time in javascript. But I ignored them at the start, but learned that that was a mistake the hard way, when I tried to extend UITableViewController.