Mac OS X: Best way to implement a card game GUI

Question

Hi,

I've started programming on Mac OS X in Objective-C and decided to create a little card game. At first I create a command line version. If everything works fine I would like to implement a GUI: Nothing big, just a green window with cards which can be dragged and dropped.

Since I don't have any idea about how to do this: What can I use to implement my card game GUI?

Since Objective-C and Cocoa looks like a "bundle" on Mac OS X, is it possible to use Cocoa for this (and how)? If not, what else should I use or is there already sth. like this?

Regards,

inno

Answer 1

Apple has some sample code here that could point you in the right direction.

Answer 2

This is a fine study in MVC.

• Your Model (an active game, player and non-player characters, the cards in the game, etc.) will be entirely in Foundation, at least at first. You can add AppKit-dependent properties such as images later, and use the C preprocessor to conditionalize that code if you want to continue maintaining your command-line program.
• Your Controllers will also generally be in pure Foundation. I say “Controllers” because you'll have one for both programs (owning the model, responding to user actions, and running the game—that is, dealing cards, enforcing the rules, etc.), one specifically for the command-line program (holding the readline/output loop), and at least one specifically for the GUI program (owning the game window).
• In the GUI app, you'll write your Views with AppKit, of course. In the command-line app, you may want to make a View class, separate from the Controllers, to make it easy to radically change the output quickly (even at runtime, if you want to allow that). Of course, that View will not descend from NSView, and will use terminal output instead of graphical drawing.

I recommend keeping the command-line version of the program alive after you make the GUI version, at least for a little while. You'll know you're doing it right when you can maintain both working versions of the program without much fuss, and even find a bug in one version of the program and fix it in both.