Chapter 1. Cocoa and Mac OS X

Since its release in 2001, Mac OS X has grown in market share slowly until, eight years later, it occupies almost ten percent of the desktop market. A lot of factors have contributed to this success: the solid, UNIX, underpinnings of the system, the simple and clean GUI (complete with eye-candy where required), and the attention to detail in all aspects of the system.

One feature is constantly lauded by third-party Mac developers: Cocoa. A set of clean, object-oriented, APIs, with a history of constant refinement dating back to the 1980s. Cocoa is what makes OS X easy and fun to develop for, but what exactly is Cocoa, and how does it fit with the rest of the system?