About Creating Your First Mac App
Your First Mac App introduces you to the Three Ts of Mac app development:
Tools. How to use Xcode to create and manage a project
Technologies. How to create an app that responds to user input
Techniques. How to take advantage of some of the fundamental design patterns that underlie all Mac app development
You will create an app with a set of controls you can use to set the volume of an audio track. In this app, there is just one audio track but you can imagine an app that independently controls the volume of multiple audio tracks. After you complete all the steps in this tutorial, you’ll have an app that looks something like this:
As you can see above, there are three main user interface (UI) elements in the app that you create:
A text field (that allows the user to enter a numeric volume)
A slider (that allows the user to graphically select a volume)
A button, titled Mute (which sets the track’s volume to zero)
When you run the finished app, you enter a numeric volume in the text field and the slider updates accordingly. As you move the slider, the text field displays the current volume. When you click the Mute button, the volume is set to zero.
To benefit from this tutorial, it helps to have some familiarity with the basics of computer programming in general and with object-oriented programming and the Objective-C language in particular. If you haven’t used Objective-C before, don’t worry if the code in this tutorial is hard to understand. When you finish Start Developing Mac Apps Today, you’ll understand the code much better.
© 2013 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved. (Last updated: 2013-04-23)