“Exploring Mac App Development Strategies” Released!

Dec 8th, 2014

book cover — Exploring Mac App Development Strategies

This weekend, I have just released my book on Mac software architecture. It’s called “Exploring Mac App Development Strategies”. In this book, I discuss how one can adopt practices for designing clean code and use it in spite of Apple’s rather invasive framework suggestions.

Buy the book now for $9.99!

I struggle with applying patterns of software architecture to Mac and iOS application development for years now. Calendar Paste relied on Apple’s design guidelines mostly, and it became hard to change the app without breaking things. The Word Counter for Mac is my first really big application, and I can’t say that it was easy to find advice on the internet on how these patterns translate to Cocoa and Mac development.

I want to fill the void. The book will help Mac and iOS developers to clean up their code and keep its design simple and intuitive.

A few weeks ago, I have just discussed how Core Data gets in the way. The book builds upon the ideas I sketched in that post, but wheras the post is about Core Data only, the example project and the book deal with designing a whole application. And there’s so much more to do, so many topics left to cover. This book is meant to be a kickstarter into the matter.

Download the book sample (PDF, 4MB) and see for yourself!

The book is available for sale right now. It’s a name-your-price thing: you could get it for only $5.99, but I think it’s worth far more than even the suggested price of $9.99. Buy the book online.** (PayPal and Credit Card accepted)

Collaborative Writing

As announced previously, this book is open source. It is made to become a collaborative writing project. This means that you can browse the Markdown plain text manuscript for free and propose changes:

Manuscript of the whole book
Sample Project Code

I will merge changes into the manuscript and publish it with updates. Every contributor will be mentioned in the book, of course.

With time, I’ll add more topics to the book. If you know about something no-one else covers properly, yet, you may propose topics on GitHub, too. Or even sketch a chapter yourself.

Why collaborate if I charge for money? Well, you can join Leanpub’s affiliate program and get 50% for every affiliate sale! I’ll be happy to integrate your pull requests and let you get a fair share of the product.

Also, the manuscript code permits both to change and re-distribute the text. You can even sell it on your own, given the proper attribution of course.

Publishing on Leanpub Is Great

I can only say that using leanpub.com to create a book is a joy. I don’t own any e-reading devices, so I can’t say a lot about the .mobi and .epub versions of the book. But the PDF looks great!

Considering how well this worked, I may turn smaller writing projects into e-books via Leanpub, too. At least I don’t have to worry about typesetting the book this way.

I could even sell the finished book someplace else. For example, it’s totally okay to put the finished product into the Amazon Kindle book store.

**Exploring Mac App Development Strategies** – Patterns & Best Practices for Clean Software Architecture on the Mac. Don’t worry about big software design decisions anymore. Take on Mac app development with solid principles, guided by extensive examples and explanation. Buy the book now!

Links to this article

Calendar Paste 2 is now Open Source

I have just pushed the current code of Calendar Paste 2 for iPhone to GitHub. I did this in part because I don’t fear anybody stealing it anyway, and also because I want to work on two machines this weekend without setting up my own server.
Making Good Use of Singletons in Refactoring the iOS App Calendar Paste

Like I promised last weekend, I am going to write about the process of cleaning up the already rotten source code of Calendar Paste. In order to break massive view controllers into manageable pieces and un-tangle everything, I have to make sure that I don’t break the current implementation. Calendar Paste didn’t have any automated tests in place. To change this fact is my first priority.
Model-View-View Model in Swift

Srdan Rasic wrote a good post on creating wrappers around value objects (like Strings, say) and custom-glue them to an application’s interface. It’s a technique I have used in my book on Mac architecture at one point but which seems to be tremendously useful for virtually anything view-related once you get to a high enough level of abstraction.

It’s weird that articles related to programming are so hard to quote. Instead of a quotation, let the resulting code illustrates what he has to say:
```
class ArticleViewController {
  var bodyTextView: UITextView
  var titleLabel: UILabel
  var dateLabel: UILabel
  var thumbnailImageView: UIImageView
   
  var viewModel: ArticleViewViewModel {
    didSet {
      viewModel.title.bindAndFire {
        [unowned self] in
        self.titleLabel.text = $0
      }
   
      viewModel.body.bindAndFire {
        [unowned self] in
        self.bodyTextView.text = $0
      }
   
      viewModel.date.bindAndFire {
        [unowned self] in
        self.dateLabel.text = $0
      }
   
      viewModel.thumbnail.bindAndFire {
        [unowned self] in
        self.thumbnailImageView.image = $0
      }
    }
  }
}
```
So now when viewModel’s properties change, the view controller will update the corresponding interface component. Sweet.

Exploring Mac App Development Strategies – Patterns & Best Practices for Clean Software Architecture on the Mac. Don’t worry about big software design decisions anymore. Take on Mac app development with solid principles, guided by extensive examples and explanation. Buy the book now!