Chapter 1. Cocoa and Mac OS X

Since its release in 2001, Mac OS X has grown in market share slowly until, eight years later, it occupies almost ten percent of the desktop market. A lot of factors have contributed to this success: the solid, UNIX, underpinnings of the system, the simple and clean GUI (complete with eye-candy where required), and the attention to detail in all aspects of the system.

One feature is constantly lauded by third-party Mac developers: Cocoa. A set of clean, object-oriented, APIs, with a history of constant refinement dating back to the 1980s. Cocoa is what makes OS X easy and fun to develop for, but what exactly is Cocoa, and how does it fit with the rest of the system?

1.1 Understanding When to Use Cocoa

Cocoa is not ...

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