This might not be a popular opinion but it was what worked for me:
- Research a little about PostScript and the display version.
- NextStep Developer Documentation [1]
- Apple older documentation (it is archived, but covered a lot of stuff)
Why this instead of a book? MacOS X UI is the result of many years of experiment and technologies. Going over the historical view gave me time to build a mental framework to work on instead of pushing things as they are today. MacOS is also changing so much that the documentation gap only gets worse with time.
Storyboards, SwiftUI, iOS, UIKit are noisy in that sense because they solve problems that you might not understand from the get go.
Understanding Objective-C is also crucial because besides SwiftUI, the backbone was made with Objective-C characteristics in mind. But this one I don’t have good references for besides Smalltalk books and Clang documentation.
Why this instead of a book? MacOS X UI is the result of many years of experiment and technologies. Going over the historical view gave me time to build a mental framework to work on instead of pushing things as they are today. MacOS is also changing so much that the documentation gap only gets worse with time.
Storyboards, SwiftUI, iOS, UIKit are noisy in that sense because they solve problems that you might not understand from the get go.
Understanding Objective-C is also crucial because besides SwiftUI, the backbone was made with Objective-C characteristics in mind. But this one I don’t have good references for besides Smalltalk books and Clang documentation.
[1] http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/NeXTStep/3.3/nd/