Building Cocoa Applications: A Step by Step Guide

Chapter 4. An Objective-C ApplicationWithout Interface Builder

As we saw in Chapter 3, Interface Builder is a tremendously powerful program. But IB also hides a lot of the nuts and bolts of how Cocoa applications work, and a knowledge of those nuts and bolts will serve you well as you learn Cocoa programming. In this chapter, we will create a simple Cocoa application in Objective-C without using IB. In the process, we’ll learn the fundamentals of the Objective-C programming language, the Cocoa class hierarchy, and memory management under Cocoa.

The Tiny.m Program

In this chapter, we’ll discuss a small application called Tiny.m (the .m extension means that the file contains Objective-C code). This program will bring up a window and will draw a dodecagon (12-sided polygon) with a fancy pattern in it (see Figure 4-1).

Figure 4-1. The Tiny.m application window

Before discussing the application in detail, we’ll show you the complete Objective-C source code for Tiny.m — Example 4-1. We’re showing you this now because the best way to learn a new language is to read a program that’s written in that language. As you’ll see, much of the code in Tiny.m that relates to on-screen objects will not be necessary when we combine Objective-C with IB.

Tip

Throughout this book, we’ve elected to include comments in the programming examples, even though we are also explaining the code within the book’s ...