As a courtesy, this is a full free rendering of my book, Programming iOS 6, by Matt Neuburg. Copyright 2013 Matt Neuburg. Please note that this edition is outdated; the current books are iOS 13 Programming Fundamentals with Swift and Programming iOS 13. If my work has been of help to you, please consider purchasing one or both of them, or you can reward me through PayPal at http://www.paypal.me/mattneub. Thank you!

Part III. Cocoa

When you program for iOS, you take advantage of a suite of frameworks provided by Apple. These frameworks, taken together, constitute Cocoa; the brand of Cocoa that provides the API for programming iOS is Cocoa Touch. Cocoa thus plays an important and fundamental role in iOS programming; your code will ultimately be almost entirely about communicating with Cocoa — interacting with the frameworks provided by Apple, in order to make an app that does what you want it to do.

The Cocoa Touch frameworks are a huge boon to you, the programmer, because they provide the underlying functionality that any iOS app needs to have. Your app can put up a window, show the interface containing a button, respond to that button being tapped by the user, and so forth, because Cocoa knows how to do those things. But with the great advantages of working with a framework come great responsibilities. You have to think the way the framework thinks, put your code where the framework expects it, and fulfill many obligations imposed on you by the framework.

  • Chapter 10 picks up where Chapter 5 left off, describing some Objective-C linguistic features used by Cocoa, such as categories and protocols; it also surveys some important fundamental classes.
  • Chapter 11 describes Cocoa’s event-driven model, along with its major design patterns. An event is a message sent by Cocoa to your code. Cocoa is event-based; if Cocoa doesn’t send your code an event, your code doesn’t run. Getting your code to run at the appropriate moment is all about knowing what events you can expect Cocoa to send you and when.
  • Chapter 12 describes your responsibilities for making your instances nicely encapsulated and good memory-management citizens in the world of Cocoa objects.
  • Chapter 13 surveys some answers to the question of how your objects are going to see and communicate with one another within the Cocoa-based world.