Question

I am planning to make a Mac application that works like Google Images for mobile. It takes the search results and makes it possible to swipe through them.

I am using a Mac, so I would like to use trackpad gestures. I think the system would be very user-friendly for going through high quality images quickly.

I am a beginner in respects to coding, but I do know the basics of C++.

Searched through to https://developers.google.com/gdata/docs/directory, but I can’t see how Picasa would be of any use because i want to use the Google Images data or database (or what the technical term is).

As this is my first serious attempt at an application, I really don’t know where to start.

Answer 1

As with most apps, there are two sides to this one:

• The front end is your Cocoa-based user interface. This is where you would receive queries from the user (in a text field) and show the results (in image views), and where you would implement the swiping (in some kind of custom view that owns the image views).
• The back end is doing Google Image Searches. This may or may not be written in Cocoa; you may decide to use somebody else’s library written in some other language, but depending on what language that is, integrating it may be harder than porting it or writing your own from scratch.

The back end you’d want for this is Google Custom Search (found by searching for “search” on their developer site and then clicking through to the replacement for the first result, which is deprecated). You’ll want to use their REST API, returning JSON, which you can parse using the NSJSONSerialization class.