Mac Development

Month Three : Week Three


        These next two weeks are dedicated to developing the Mac implementation for GWindow. I was two days behind at the beginning of this week because of the issues I encountered with Linux and the bug we all fixed as a group. The main issue I ran into for Mac this week was the fact that the message Loop for Mac is handled very differently from Windows and Linux and  I was very unfamiliar with the Objective-C language I would need to use to complete the Mac side of GWindow.


       First I looked at the Mac side of the libraries that the other Gateware members had already made. Through this and some Cocoa documentation I figured out that the WndProc functions I created for the Windows and Linux side of the message loops for GWindow are handled by a custom object called a Responder or a Delegate in Mac. Essentially a delegate is like a listener that you attach to an object you'd like to receive events from (like a window). The delegate is then filled with overridden event catching functions like windowDidResize windowDidMove. Inside these functions is where I fill out my custom GWindow events and pass them along to my GWindow's listeners.

       However, just writing the delegate wasn't enough. Now I had to figure out how to connect them to my window which is being handled in a different file and even a different language. It turns out .mm and .cpp can be included directly into each other, and my GWindowDelegate was declared in the .mm with the class declaration and then assigned to my window with [window setDelegate:GWDelegate]. In the end, it took a a lot of official Cocoa documentation reading and testing things out in a separate testApp to get things to work correctly.