Switching from iOS Development to Mac Development

Question

I want to update my developing knowledge from iOS to Mac for distributing my apps to Mac App Store. What are the differences? What are the limitations?

For example, if I want to port my iPhone app that syncs contacts with social network the various NSRequest or ABAddressBook are the same? It changes only views and corresponding view controllers? Does exists some sort of "adapters" from iOS to Mac to easily convert iOS apps to Mac?

In general, what challenges Mac apps arise respect to iOS apps? Thanks

Answer 1

If you've gathered some experience you will get along with mac development in no time. Mac and iOS have many things in common, however there are some gotchas, not all of which are visible at first glance.

The most obvious difference may be the use of viewcontrollers - cocoa for mac knows viewcontrollers, however they play a different (and less important) role.

I think the best approach for you would be to take a quick look at the Cocoa Application Tutorial and the Cocoa Fundamentals Guide. Most of it will appear familiar to you. Other than that I'd suggest to not port that project over, but use it as a opportunity to learn mac dev and recreate it from scratch (if it is not too complex). Of course you can copy paste many of the logic stuff, no need to reinvent the wheel.

By the way, I started out developing for iOS too and I found it to be very easy to get used to cocoa mac.

As to your question regarding NSURLRequest (I think that's what you meant, theres no NSRequest in either platform), they are almost the same. Just look it up in the reference library. I found it very helpful to have the iOS and mac os reference library available at the same in my browser, so I could look up differences quickly.