Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. Cocoa Development Tools

Getting started with Cocoa requires that quite a few concepts be presented at once. Since a book is a linear construction, we have had to make some choices as to what pieces to present first. In order to get your hands dirty using the tools, we chose to introduce Apple’s Development Tools first as a way to get you started in building your first Cocoa application. You’ll see some concepts here that will be glossed over. Don’t worry; we will revisit them as we go. For now, though, just go along for the ride and try not to pay too much attention to the details we’re saving for later.

Installing the Developer Tools

When Apple released Mac OS X, they made a really great decision. They decided to provide their development tools to every Mac user for free. These tools allow development of Carbon- and Cocoa-based applications, system libraries, BSD command-line utilities, hardware device drivers, and even kernel extensions. We’ll be focusing on two of these tools to develop Cocoa-based applications throughout the book: Project Builder for editing, compiling, and debugging source code, and Interface Builder for laying out the graphical user interface (GUI) components for the application.

By default, the tools aren’t installed, as most users won’t use them and probably want the almost 500 MB of disk space for something else. But developers can easily find them and install them from a variety of sources. And, since they are free, any user who wants to try ...