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Leopard Guides: Cocoa
Design guidelines offer fundamental rules and tips to help developers make sound design decisions when they are developing Cocoa programs. Also included are explanations of basic architectures, paradigms, and design patterns that are important for all Cocoa developers to understand.

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64-Bit Transition Guide for Cocoa (HTML) (PDF)
Explains how to port Cocoa projects to 64-bit addressing.
2009-03-03
Accessibility Programming Guidelines for Cocoa (HTML) (PDF)
Explains how Cocoa applications make their user interface available to external assistive applications.
2007-02-08
Apple Human Interface Guidelines (HTML) (PDF)
Introduces the Mac OS X user experience and explains how to design an application for Aqua.
2008-06-09
Application Architecture Overview (HTML) (PDF)
Explains the architecture of a Cocoa application and how it interacts with the operating system.
2006-08-07
Carbon-Cocoa Integration Guide (HTML) (PDF)
Explains how to use both Carbon and Cocoa in developing an application.
2007-10-31
Cocoa Application Tutorial Using Bindings (HTML) (PDF)
A hands-on introduction to Cocoa bindings.
2007-07-10
Cocoa Bindings Programming Topics (HTML) (PDF)
Explains how to rapidly develop sophisticated user interfaces using Cocoa binding technology.
2009-03-08
Cocoa Fundamentals Guide (HTML) (PDF)
Introduces the basic concepts, terminology, architectures, and design patterns of the Cocoa frameworks and development environment.
2008-11-19
Cocoa Scripting Guide (HTML) (PDF)
Explains how to create scriptable Cocoa applications that use the scripting definition (sdef) format.
2008-03-11
Coding Guidelines for Cocoa (HTML) (PDF)
Naming guidelines for Cocoa API and design advice to framework developers.
2006-04-04
Core Data Programming Guide (HTML) (PDF)
Explains how to manage objects using the Core Data framework.
2009-03-04
Core Data Utility Tutorial (HTML) (PDF)
A hands-on guide to creating a command-line utility using low-level features of Core Data.
2009-03-04
Document-Based Applications Overview (HTML) (PDF)
Explains how to design and implement Cocoa applications that manage multiple documents.
2009-01-12
Error Handling Programming Guide For Cocoa (HTML) (PDF)
Describes NSError objects, related Application Kit support for error handling, and how to use these features in your code.
2009-03-04
Garbage Collection Programming Guide (HTML) (PDF)
Describes the garbage collection system for Cocoa.
2008-11-19
Key-Value Coding Programming Guide (HTML) (PDF)
Conceptual information about how to access a Cocoa object's values using keys.
2009-02-04
Key-Value Observing Programming Guide (HTML) (PDF)
Explains the Cocoa key-value observing protocol.
2009-05-06
Memory Management Programming Guide for Cocoa (HTML) (PDF)
Explains how to allocate and deallocate objects in Cocoa.
2009-05-06
Model Object Implementation Guide (HTML) (PDF)
Describes issues relating to the design and implementation of model objects
2008-02-08
Notification Programming Topics for Cocoa (HTML) (PDF)
Explains how to send and receive information about events in Cocoa programs.
2007-05-03
NSPersistentDocument Core Data Tutorial (HTML) (PDF)
Step-by-step instructions for building a simple but functionally rich application using NSPersistentDocument and Cocoa bindings.
2009-02-04
NSPersistentDocument Core Data Tutorial for Mac OS X v10.4. (HTML) (PDF)
Deprecated - Step-by-step instructions for building a simple but functionally rich application using NSPersistentDocument and Cocoa bindings.
2009-02-04
Object-Oriented Programming with Objective-C (HTML) (PDF)
Describes object-oriented programming from the perspective of an Objective-C developer.
2008-11-19
Predicate Programming Guide (HTML) (PDF)
Describes how to specify queries in Cocoa.
2009-05-06
Ruby and Python Programming Topics for Mac OS X (HTML) (PDF)
Describes Ruby and Python on Mac OS X, and especially the bridges between them and Objective-C and OSA (AppleScript).
2007-10-31
Runtime Configuration Guidelines (HTML) (PDF)
Conceptual and reference information for dynamically configuring your software.
2008-07-08
Spotlight Overview (HTML) (PDF)
Introduces the main components and services of Apple's metadata technology.
2007-05-27
Undo Architecture (HTML) (PDF)
Explains how to record information in Cocoa so a user can reverse an operation's effect.
2002-11-12
User Interface Validation (HTML) (PDF)
Explains how to use the standard mechanism to validate user interface items in Cocoa.
2007-07-10
Xcode Design Tools for Class Modeling (HTML) (PDF)
Describes the Xcode Design Tools for Class Modeling.
2009-02-04
Xcode Unit Testing Guide (HTML) (PDF)
Explains how to incorporate test cases to validate individual units of source code.
2008-05-02