There’s a really telling thread active on the cocoa-unbound mailing list right now, regarding the difficulty in grasping how to structure applications in Mac OS X, especially as compared to its sibling iOS, and the materials that are available, a subject with which I’ve become quite familiar as I hack on STRIP for Mac OS X:
When I create a new Rails application or Ruby Gem, there’s a clear, predefined application structure. Its obvious what things go where. It’s the same structure every time,
When I first created new iPhone projects, picking a “Navigation-based app” or such like gave you all the structure you’d really need for that type of app. You could see exactly where the VCs lived, how they hooked up to NIBs and how they talked to each other. I don’t need the templates now, but they were very instructive in the beginning.
I’m missing the same thing for Mac applications.
Exactly. List users are starting to add their suggestions for reference material and tutorials, some good resources there. But really, we could use some better, more comprehensive materials from The Source for Mac OS X. The WWDC video sessions are invaluable, the small app examples are great, the API documentation is fantastic, but we devs really could use some beefier, more complex, real-world reference materials.
Update: It’s not really a how-to document, but I did get a lot out of Matt Gallagher’s article, The design of every Mac application.