Driven by Example, this Book Applies Useful Patterns of Clean Software Architecture to Mac App Development

You do some kind or other of what may be called "software architecture" anyway.

So better know the reasons for the moves you take. Own the alternatives, and design your code accordingly to gain confidence that your stuff is really working.

Learn how to …

• design reusable code,
• get a solid test harness up and running, and
• separate the components of your application. 

All this will make your application easier to change and easier to maintain. It will make you a happier developer, even when you're just exploring new parts of the Cocoa Framework.

To develop Mac applications, you'll need to know why and how to separate components. Using the latest technology and a head-start into Swift programming, this book will show you the pro's and con's of several design decisions and discuss alternative approaches so you get to know your options.

The Core Ideas of the Book

I want to share the core ideas and theses of the book with you:

• Apple's Core Data is a very invasive framework. It works best when you couple everything, beginning at the user interface, to Core Data entities. Cocoa Bindings make a lot of the magic possible, but they come at a cost: the Core Data entities (or NSManagedObject subclasses, for that matter) are bound to do a lot of different things for different "clients", wheras by 'client' I mean consuming views, background services, and the like. It'd be easier to maintain the code if you model entities for each "Bounded Context" separately.
• Adopting Domain-Driven Design thinking, small service objects are favorable. It's easy to create Data Transfor Objects in Swift using structs, for example. Core Data should be pushed outside the domain (i.e. where the business logic is hosted) and become an implementation detail.
• Once you free your app from the entanglement by Core Data (and other Apple suggested best practices which don't scale well), you will be able to leverage powerful design patterns. I created domain event wrappers around NSNotification to make event handling easier and failure-proof. Using events to propagate changes (instead of using Bindings, for example) makes concurrent programming easier.

That's part of the topics we cover in this book. Maybe you won't be a DDD expert afterwards, but so neither am I. Instead, we'll explore useful patterns to make the code manageable and to get more comfortable ever writing Mac applications which are ready to scale.

The Book is Open Source, by the way!

The book is Open Source. You can contribute on GitHub:

• Book manuscript and manuscript website
• Example project code

Just create a pull request if you came up with a better description of something, or if you want to add a useful reference, for example. Together, we can make the book a lot better.

Your feedback is much appreciated!

To sell outside the Mac App Store doesn't have to take more than a couple hours.

Save days of research and start selling your app before an Apple review person would even notice your upload to the App Store.

Selling in the Mac App Store is easy. But it also cost you 30% of the revenue. And you can't provide a demo. And you can't provide upgrade pricing. And you don't get to know your customers.

FastSpring is a very well established ecommerce platform where a lot of big indie developer studios sell their applications for years.

It doesn't take much to jump onto the bandwagon and get all the flexibility of selling outside the MAS with next to no effort. You're in good company – and I've collected quite a few case studies of reknown indie teams like Smile and Ironic Software to show you what they do.

You can make more money per sale and integrate a time-based trial and license code verification into your app within the hour!

This book includes every step to get your app out there.

You'll learn how to perform the following tasks:

• Set up a product for sale at FastSpring, including license code generation and professional order confirmation e-mails.
• Guard your precious app against software piracy, requiring license code and name to let users pass.
• Implement a registration handler in your app which verifies the license information. You can copy this well-tested code right into your existing app!
• Add a time-based trial to your application which expires even when the application is running. This, too, can be copied right into your existing app!

As a bonus, you'll learn a few things about Mac software architecture through well-written, fully functional sample applications which are thoroughly tested. There are more than 200 test cases included in the code repository!