Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard introduced a new user interface concept called Bottom Bars. This interface element is very handy for displaying peripheral information and providing easy access to key actions. Many of the standard applications that come with a Mac, such as Finder and iTunes, display such bottom bars, albeit in very varying ways. [...]

Of late I’ve been working on a Cocoa update for an old app of mine, xMod. xMod edits hidden preferences (I know, you’ve heard this all before.) Each preference is stored in a property list on its own, along with the information that xMod will display about it. This system will allow us to add [...]

Why is it difficult?
Most Cocoa developers will understand the use of the NSUserDefaults class. User Defaults is the system that Apple created allowing applications to store preference data in a Property List file on your computer. This is all well and good until you want to change a preference key in an application that isn’t [...]

Whether you’re applying new preferences, installing a new version of your app, or perhaps something more unusual, there may come a time in your life where you say to yourself “I really wish I could automatically restart my application.”
Your first instinct would be to check the documentation for NSApplication to see if there was an [...]

We’ve all seen it done before: some applications make great use of that dead space in the upper right-hand corner of the window chrome. Many applications choose to place a subtle reminder to register within a time period; others utilize it for an out of the way configuration option. Apple’s own iCal uses it for [...]

Introduction
Before you begin to learn the basic syntax of Cocoa (the API created by Apple for writing desktop Mac applications in Objective-C), you must first gain a firm grasp of the following two concepts:
  a. Object Oriented Programming
  b. The Model-View-Controller System (MVC)
Object Oriented programming is a way of writing code that allows you to [...]