Right programing language for developing application for Mac

Question

I\'m planing to buy a Mac. I would like to be able to develop GUI applications for Mac as well. Currently I develop in C# using VisualStudio as IDE. I also know Java and I\'

Answer 1

Yes it's Objective C. But check this out.

If you are familiar with HTML, CSS and Java Script, you can build platform independent desktop apps using Electron by Github. It's indeed amazing. The desktop Apps like slack, atom, postman are built using this framework. Please refer: https://electron.atom.io/

You can also use Qt which is a great cross-platform application development framework that is based on C++. Please refer: https://www.qt.io/developers/

Answer 2

Objective-C with Cocoa should be your first, second, and third choices. That being said the learning curve can be steep but half the fun of this business is learning something new.

At my job (Seapine Software) we extensively use C++ with the Qt framework on the Mac and it also seems to work fine. If I were starting out I'd definitely go with Objective-C.

Answer 3

I'm an iOS developer & use Objective-C every day, but if I were writing an OS X app, I'd definitely try out MacRuby. However, there is little controversy that, at present, if you want to write OS X native apps, you eventually must learn Objective-C. Most, like myself, grow to like it. Moreover, on OS X you have the advantage that you can run it garbage-collected and possibly save yourself some bookkeeping.

Answer 4

Daniel Steinberg says it well in the introduction to his Cocoa Programming book:

Use Objective-C. Sure, you can write Cocoa applications in other languages. But for now, learn the native language. There is a lot of support for new developers on the various Apple lists and in the support documentation, tutorials, and sample code accessible from Xcode. You will have an easier time of getting your question answered if you use the lingua franca of Cocoa development.

Answer 5

It's Objective-C. But if you want a beautiful and easy language, you can use python with wxPython. It'll look as native and, furthermore, it will make your applications multi-platform.

For the GUI designer, check wxFormBuilder. It supports wxPython for exporting.

Answer 6

There really is only one choice and that's Objective-C and XCode, anything else and you'll be running into problems and/or limitations.

As some have mentioned Python is one suggestion but what GUI toolkit to use? Then packaging becomes a problem.

Mono is OK but still a little buggy (and slooooow) on Mac's.

I haven't tried Java but the Apple port of the Java VM has just beed deprecated, make of that what you will.

XCode is very very good and integrates nicely with Mac/iPhone/iPad etc. but Obj-C takes a while to learn coming from a C#/Java background, plus XCode forces you to use MVC patterns in everything which again can be a culture shock.

I would say go with Obj-C and XCode and learn something new.