I’ve written another book! This one is for people who want to get started in macOS development and here it is: macOS Apprentice, published by kodeco.com (formerly raywenderlich.com).

If you’re a beginner or near-beginner who wants to start learning Swift, SwiftUI and AppKit for building Mac apps, then this is the book for you.

Book Cover

Contents

The book consists of four sections:

Section 1: Install Xcode and learn the basics of programming in Swift. Experiment with several different ways to execute Swift code on your Mac.

Section 2: Use SwiftUI to develop a word-guessing game called Snowman. Learn about data flow in SwiftUI, managing multiple windows, using charts and adding macOS-specific features such as toolbars and menus.

Section 3: There are still a number of tasks where AppKit works better than SwiftUI. In this section, build an AppKit app to browse movie data from IMDb, the online movie database.

Section 4: Add AppKit to your SwiftUI app and add SwiftUI to your AppKit app in order to add some finishing touches to both of the apps from the previous sections.

You can read more details of the book contents in the Introduction.

If you are a more experienced iOS developer who wants to branch out into macOS development, then my previous book - macOS by Tutorials - might be a better fit, although I think you could still learn a lot of Mac app tips and tricks from this one.

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.

For support, to ask questions or to report any errors, please go to the forum.

Thanks to…

This book was made possible by an awesome team. There were a lot of people involved, but I want to give special thanks to:

  • Richard Critz, the wonderful editor who had the unenviable task of fixing my grammar.
  • Audrey Tam and Ehab Amer were the amazing tech editors who had to make sure that it all worked. Audrey also contributed the first chapter on installing and setting up Xcode.

The whole team at Kodeco was great, so a huge thanks to them all. I hope they enjoyed working on the book as much as I did! It’s wonderful to have such a supportive group working to make my content as good as it can be.

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.