I can finally reveal the reason I have not been blogging. I have been busy writing a book. It’s finally out, so here it is: macOS by Tutorials, published by kodeco.com (formerly raywenderlich.com).

Book Cover

Anyone who reads my posts or tweets will know that I am a passionate advocate for building real native macOS apps. This book is aimed at iOS developers who know some Swift and SwiftUI but don’t yet know all the tips and tricks needed to convert that knowledge into a great Mac experience.

You don’t need to be a highly experienced developer, but some basic Swift will be useful.

Contents

The book consists of five sections. In each of the first four sections, I’ll walk you through developing a complete app. Each one is a different type of app using different techniques and different frameworks.

Section 1: Use SwiftUI to build a multi-paned window app. Learn how to manage windows, menus and toolbars.

Section 2: Build a menu-bar app using AppKit with a bit of SwiftUI.

Section 3: Back to SwiftUI to create a document-based app, with a bit of AppKit.

Section 4: Use your new skills to make an app that communicates with the macOS Terminal.

The final section deals with app distribution, covering both inside and outside the Mac App Store.

You can read more details of the book contents and why I wanted to write it in the Introduction which is a free section.

Thanks to…

I call this my book, but of course, it was only made possible by an awesome team. There were a lot of people involved, but I want to give special thanks to:

  • Ray Wenderlich who always has time for my Mac obsession and who let me write the book I wanted to write.

  • Manda Frederick was the book team lead when we started and was a huge source of encouragement.

  • Richard Critz, the wonderful editor who had the unenviable task of fixing my grammar. He was very supportive and helped me to convince everyone of the merits of this approach.

  • Audrey Tam and Ehab Amer were the amazing tech editors who had to make sure the instructions all worked and made sense. They took what I wrote and made it a lot better.

The whole team at Kodeco / Ray Wenderlich was great, so a huge thanks to them all. And I hope they enjoyed working on the book half as much as I did, because I had the best time!

Where can you read the book?

  • You can read it online at kodeco.com as part of a Kodeco subscription.
  • You can download an ebook (ePub or pdf) at the same page if you have a subscription or buy one there if you don’t.
  • The paperback is available at Amazon.

All the code and extra materials for the book can be downloaded or cloned from GitHub.

Feedback

I would love to hear from anyone who read the book, loved it, hated it, found an error or just wanted to say hello.

You can contact me directly using any of the contact links at the bottom of this page or through the Contact page. There is also an official forum for the book where you can ask questions and tell us about any errors you find.