Make A Simple Macos App

Basically, a Mac application has a .app extension, but it’s not really a file — it’s a package. You can view the application’s contents by navigating to it in the Finder, right-clicking it and then choosing “Show Package Contents”.

The internal folder structure may vary between apps, but you can be sure that every Mac app will have a Contents folder with a MacOS subfolder in it. Inside the MacOS directory, there’s an extension-less file with the exact same name as the app itself. This file can be anything really, but in its simplest form it’s a shell script. As it turns out, this folder/file structure is all it takes to create a functional app!

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Enter appify

Aug 27, 2012 Choose a folder in your computer and click “Create”. The project is ready, and you should have a Mac Application with an single empty window. Let’s check out how it looks. Find the “Run” button, which is located in the left side of the toolbar at the top of XCode. Click it and XCode will begin to build the app.
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Jul 30, 2017 How to Make an Icon for Your iOS or macOS App 30 July 2017; by: Cezar Popescu When creating a macOS or iOS app a very important part of the process is the actual coding of the application but once that is completed an almost equally important task arises: designing the graphics of your app.

After this discovery, Thomas Aylott came up with a clever “appify” script that allows you to easily create Mac apps from shell scripts. The code looks like this:

Installing and using appify is pretty straightforward if you’re used to working with UNIX. (I’m not, so I had to figure this out.) Here’s how to install it:

Save the script to a directory in your PATH and name it appify (no extension). I chose to put it in /usr/local/bin, which requires root privileges.
Fire up Terminal.app and enter sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/appify to make appify executable without root privileges.

After that, you can create apps based on any shell script simply by launching Terminal.app and entering something like this:

Obviously, this would create a stand-alone application named Your App Name.app that executes the your-shell-script.sh script.

After that, you can very easily add a custom icon to the app if you want to.

Adding a custom app icon

Create an .icns file or a 512×512 PNG image with the icon you want, and copy it to the clipboard (⌘ + C). (Alternatively, copy it from an existing app as described in steps 2 and 3.)
Right-click the .app file of which you want to change the icon and select “Get Info” (or select the file and press ⌘ + I).
Select the app icon in the top left corner by clicking it once. It will get a subtle blue outline if you did it right.
Now hit ⌘ + V (paste) to overwrite the default icon with the new one.

Note that this will work for any file or folder, not just .app files.

Examples

Chrome/Chromium bootstrappers

I like to run Chrome/Chromium with some command-line switches or flags enabled. On Windows, you can create a shortcut and set the parameters you want in its properties; on a Mac, you’ll need to launch it from the command line every time. Well, not anymore :)

The & at the end is not a typo; it is there to make sure Chromium is launched in a separate thread. Without the &, Chromium would exit as soon as you quit Terminal.app.

Launch a local web server from a directory

Say you’re working on a project and you want to debug it from a web server. The following shell script will use Python to launch a local web server from a specific directory and open the index page in your default browser of choice. After appifying it, you won’t even need to open the terminal for it anymore.

More?

Needless to say, the possibilities are endless. Just to give another example, you could very easily create an app that minifies all JavaScript and CSS files in a specific folder. Got any nice ideas? Let me know by leaving a comment!

This document is the starting point for learning how to create Mac apps. It contains fundamental information about the OS X environment and how your apps interact with that environment. It also contains important information about the architecture of Mac apps and tips for designing key parts of your app.

At a Glance

Cocoa is the application environment that unlocks the full power of OS X. Cocoa provides APIs, libraries, and runtimes that help you create fast, exciting apps that automatically inherit the beautiful look and feel of OS X, as well as standard behaviors users expect.

Cocoa Helps You Create Great Apps for OS X

You write apps for OS X using Cocoa, which provides a significant amount of infrastructure for your program. Fundamental design patterns are used throughout Cocoa to enable your app to interface seamlessly with subsystem frameworks, and core application objects provide key behaviors to support simplicity and extensibility in app architecture. Key parts of the Cocoa environment are designed particularly to support ease of use, one of the most important aspects of successful Mac apps. Many apps should adopt iCloud to provide a more coherent user experience by eliminating the need to synchronize data explicitly between devices.

Relevant Chapters:The Mac Application Environment, The Core App Design, and Integrating iCloud Support Into Your App

Common Behaviors Make Apps Complete

During the design phase of creating your app, you need to think about how to implement certain features that users expect in well-formed Mac apps. Integrating these features into your app architecture can have an impact on the user experience: accessibility, preferences, Spotlight, services, resolution independence, fast user switching, and the Dock. Enabling your app to assume full-screen mode, taking over the entire screen, provides users with a more immersive, cinematic experience and enables them to concentrate fully on their content without distractions.

Relevant Chapters:Supporting Common App Behaviors and Implementing the Full-Screen Experience

Get It Right: Meet System and App Store Requirements

Configuring your app properly is an important part of the development process. Mac apps use a structured directory called a bundle to manage their code and resource files. And although most of the files are custom and exist to support your app, some are required by the system or the App Store and must be configured properly. The application bundle also contains the resources you need to provide to internationalize your app to support multiple languages.

Finish Your App with Performance Tuning

As you develop your app and your project code stabilizes, you can begin performance tuning. Of course, you want your app to launch and respond to the user’s commands as quickly as possible. A responsive app fits easily into the user’s workflow and gives an impression of being well crafted. You can improve the performance of your app by speeding up launch time and decreasing your app’s code footprint.

Relevant Chapter:Tuning for Performance and Responsiveness

How to Use This Document

This guide introduces you to the most important technologies that go into writing an app. In this guide you will see the whole landscape of what's needed to write one. That is, this guide shows you all the 'pieces' you need and how they fit together. There are important aspects of app design that this guide does not cover, such as user interface design. However, this guide includes many links to other documents that provide details about the technologies it introduces, as well as links to tutorials that provide a hands-on approach.

In addition, this guide emphasizes certain technologies introduced in OS X v10.7, which provide essential capabilities that set your app apart from older ones and give it remarkable ease of use, bringing some of the best features from iOS to OS X.

Golje