Question

I’m learning (watching videos) on iphone development, and I am curious if this knowledge can be transfered to creating regular Mac OS X desktop applications?

i.e. is it MVC based also? is allot of the framework carried over also?

Just a little confused between cocoa, iOS and if they overlap.

P.S what is the shortcut keys to launch an iphone app? I can’t figure out what that wierd symbol is.

Answer 1

In essence "yes". However, taking each of your questions in turn:

1. Whilst there’s no UIKit classes on Mac OS X, the general development approach (and indeed a lot of the pure Cocoa class specifics) are identical. The run loop/event based nature of both systems are also effectively identical from a programming perspective.

   As such, time spent learning the iOS way of doing things will pay off if you go on to develop Mac OS X applications, as you’ll know parts of the Cocoa framework and what you’ve learnt of the UIKit bits and pieces will transfer across to the Mac OS X’s NSxxx equivalents.

2. iOS and Mac OS X Cocoa development are both MVC, although it really depends on the programmer to keep things "pure".

In terms of launching an iPhone app, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, but at a guess, the "weird" symbol could be the command (a.k.a.: "clover") key that’s a standard part of all Mac keyboards. (A bit like the Windows key on Windows keyboards these days.)

Incidentally, there’s some general Cocoa/Cocoa Touch information over on the Apple site, although this is fairly high level.