Cocoa Touch

Last updated
Cocoa Touch
Developer(s) Apple Inc.
Operating system iOS
Type Software framework
License Proprietary
Website developer.apple.com/technologies/ios/cocoa-touch.html   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Cocoa Touch is the application development environment [1] for building software programs to run on iOS for the iPhone and iPod Touch, iPadOS for the iPad, watchOS for the Apple Watch, and tvOS for the Apple TV, from Apple Inc.

Contents

Cocoa Touch provides an abstraction layer of iOS, the operating system for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Cocoa Touch is based on the macOS Cocoa API toolset and, like it, is primarily written in the Objective-C language. Cocoa Touch allows the use of hardware and features that are not found in macOS computers and are thus unique to the iOS range of devices. Just like Cocoa, Cocoa Touch follows a Model–View–Controller (MVC) software architecture.

Cocoa Touch contains a different set of graphical control elements from Cocoa. Tools for developing applications based on Cocoa Touch are included in the iOS SDK.

Cocoa Touch in relation to other layers

iOS, watchOS, and tvOS technologies can be seen as a set of layers, with Cocoa Touch at the highest level and the Core OS/kernel at the bottom.

A hierarchical view of the iOS, watchOS, and tvOS technologies can be shown as follows:

  1. Cocoa Touch
  2. Media / Application Services
  3. Core Services
  4. Core OS / iOS kernel

Main features

Some of the main features and technologies of Cocoa Touch are:

Main frameworks

Cocoa Touch provides the key frameworks for developing applications on devices running iOS. Some of these key frameworks are:

Ports

Microsoft's WinObjC, the GNUstep-based iOS bridge for the Universal Windows Platform, contains a working implementation of Cocoa Touch frameworks like Foundation, UIKit, and MapKit released under the MIT License. [2] One of the UIKit implementations is based on XAML. [3]

Various efforts have tried to bring UIKit, the modified AppKit from Cocoa Touch, to macOS:

Related Research Articles

Darwin is the core Unix operating system of macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS, visionOS, and bridgeOS. It previously existed as an independent open-source operating system, first released by Apple Inc. in 2000. It is composed of code derived from NeXTSTEP, FreeBSD, other BSD operating systems, Mach, and other free software projects' code, as well as code developed by Apple.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenStep</span> Defunct object-oriented application programming interface specification

OpenStep is an object-oriented application programming interface (API) specification developed by NeXT. It provides a framework for building graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and developing software applications. OpenStep was designed to be platform-independent, allowing developers to write code that could run on multiple operating systems, including NeXTSTEP, Windows NT, and various Unix-based systems. It has influenced the development of other GUI frameworks, such as Cocoa for macOS and GNUstep.

Cocoa is Apple's native object-oriented application programming interface (API) for its desktop operating system macOS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNUstep</span> Open source widget toolkit and application development tools

GNUstep is a free software implementation of the Cocoa Objective-C frameworks, widget toolkit, and application development tools for Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. It is part of the GNU Project.

A computing platform, digital platform, or software platform is an environment in which software is executed. It may be the hardware or the operating system (OS), a web browser and associated application programming interfaces, or other underlying software, as long as the program code is executed using the services provided by the platform. Computing platforms have different abstraction levels, including a computer architecture, an OS, or runtime libraries. A computing platform is the stage on which computer programs can run.

The history of macOS, Apple's current Mac operating system formerly named Mac OS X until 2011 and then OS X until 2016, began with the company's project to replace its "classic" Mac OS. That system, up to and including its final release Mac OS 9, was a direct descendant of the operating system Apple had used in its Mac computers since their introduction in 1984. However, the current macOS is a UNIX operating system built on technology that had been developed at NeXT from the 1980s until Apple purchased the company in early 1997.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xcode</span> IDE including tools for developing software for Apple platforms

Xcode is Apple's integrated development environment (IDE) for macOS, used to develop software for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS. It was initially released in late 2003; the latest stable release is version 15, released on September 18, 2023, and is available free of charge via the Mac App Store and the Apple Developer website. Registered developers can also download preview releases and prior versions of the suite through the Apple Developer website. Xcode includes command-line tools that enable UNIX-style development via the Terminal app in macOS. They can also be downloaded and installed without the GUI.

In software engineering, a compatibility layer is an interface that allows binaries for a legacy or foreign system to run on a host system. This translates system calls for the foreign system into native system calls for the host system. With some libraries for the foreign system, this will often be sufficient to run foreign binaries on the host system. A hardware compatibility layer consists of tools that allow hardware emulation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XNU</span> Computer operating system kernel

XNU is the computer operating system (OS) kernel developed at Apple Inc. since December 1996 for use in the Mac OS X operating system and released as free and open-source software as part of the Darwin OS, which in addition to macOS is also the basis for the Apple TV Software, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, visionOS, and tvOS OSes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AppKit</span> Graphical user interface toolkit

AppKit is a graphical user interface toolkit. It initially served as the UI framework for NeXTSTEP. Along with Foundation and Display PostScript, it became one of the core parts of the OpenStep specification of APIs. Later, AppKit and Foundation became part of Cocoa, the Objective-C API framework of macOS. GNUstep, GNU's implementation of the OpenStep/Cocoa API, also contains an implementation of the AppKit API.

In NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, and their lineal descendants macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS, and in GNUstep, a bundle is a file directory with a defined structure and file extension, allowing related files to be grouped together as a conceptually single item.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Architecture of macOS</span> Layers of the operating system

The architecture of macOS describes the layers of the operating system that is the culmination of Apple Inc.'s decade-long research and development process to replace the classic Mac OS.

iOS Mobile operating system by Apple

iOS is a mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its smartphones. It was unveiled in January 2007 for the first-generation iPhone, launched in June 2007.

iOS SDK Software development kit for iOS

The iOS SDK, formerly the iPhone SDK, is a software development kit (SDK) developed by Apple Inc. The kit allows for the development of mobile apps on Apple's iOS and iPadOS operating systems.

Cocos2d is an open-source game development framework for creating 2D games and other graphical software for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, HarmonyOS, OpenHarmony and web platforms. It is written in C++ and provides bindings for various programming languages, including C++, C#, Lua, and JavaScript. The framework offers a wide range of features, including physics, particle systems, skeletal animations, tile maps, and others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Darling (software)</span> Open-source macOS compatibility layer

Darling is a free and open-source macOS compatibility layer for Linux. It duplicates functions of macOS by providing alternative implementations of the libraries and frameworks that macOS programs call. This method of duplication differs from other methods that might also be considered emulation, where macOS programs run in a virtual machine. Darling has been called the counterpart to WINE for running macOS apps.

Cycada is a compatibility layer that aims to allow applications designed for iOS to run unmodified on the Android operating system. The method uses compile-time adaptation to run unmodified code with minimal implementation effort.

Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is a computing platform created by Microsoft and introduced in Windows 10. The purpose of this platform is to help develop universal apps that run on Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile (discontinued), Windows 11, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and HoloLens without the need to be rewritten for each. It supports Windows app development using C++, C#, VB.NET, and XAML. The API is implemented in C++, and supported in C++, VB.NET, C#, F# and JavaScript. Designed as an extension to the Windows Runtime (WinRT) platform introduced in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, UWP allows developers to create apps that will potentially run on multiple types of devices.

SwiftUI is a user interface framework for building user interfaces for iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS and macOS, developed by Apple Inc. for the Swift programming language.

References

  1. ↑ "Cocoa (Touch)". developer.apple.com. Retrieved 2019-11-21.
  2. ↑ "microsoft/WinObjC/Frameworks: Objective-C for Windows". GitHub. Retrieved 17 February 2020.
  3. ↑ "WinObjC: Migrating UIKit Controls to XAML". GitHub.
  4. ↑ Heber, Sean. "BigZaphod/Chameleon: Chameleon is a port of Apple's UIKit for iOS (and some minimal related frameworks) to Mac OS X." GitHub.
  5. ↑ "ZeeZide/UXKit: Write code that works on both, UIKit and AppKit". GitHub. ZeeZide. 19 December 2019. Retrieved 17 February 2020.
  6. ↑ Hall, Zac (5 February 2015). "UIKit-like framework called UXKit used in Photos for Mac". 9to5Mac.
  7. ↑ Demasi, Adam (7 June 2018). "A quick look at UIKit on macOS".
  8. ↑ "Mac Catalyst". Apple Developer Documentation. Retrieved 17 February 2020.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.