Swift Development with Cocoa

Chapter 19. Nonstandard Apps

For the majority of this book, we’ve talked about GUI applications designed to run on either OS X or iOS. These applications receive user input via the mouse, keyboard, or touchscreen, display information via the screen, and are launched by double-clicking them on OS X or tapping them on iOS.

However, not every piece of software that you write is a traditional app. In some cases, you might want to create something that the user doesn’t need to interact with—for example, a background application that automatically downloads files from the Internet. Another case where you don’t want to build a traditional app is when you want to create a preference pane, which the user can access via the System Preferences application.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to build apps for OS X that don’t fit the mold of standard applications. Specifically, you’ll learn how to build command-line tools (which don’t use a GUI), system preference panes, and applications that add an item to the system-wide menu bar. Finally, you’ll learn how to make apps on iOS that can use more than one screen.

Note

This chapter mostly applies to OS X only—on iOS, you can only build apps that display a graphical interface interface, and command-line tools and daemons aren’t supported.

The only exception to this is iOS Apps with Multiple Windows.

Command-Line Tools

The simplest possible application on OS X is a command-line tool. This kind of app never presents a GUI to the user, but instead sends and ...