Tutorials on Macos Apps

The status menus (also known as menu bar icons) of a macOS menu bar let users quickly access status information and perform actions without launching an application inside a new, separate window. For example, upon installation, a popular desktop application like Dropbox automatically adds a status menu to the macOS menu bar for monitoring and reporting the status of uploads. With the single click of an icon/title, the status menu toggles open a condensed version of the Dropbox desktop application. You can get the latest uploads and share them immediately without having to change your active window. Status menus helps to maximize your workflow and keep you productive. They run in the background and periodically update with new notifications and content to avoid distracting you while you are focused on completing your work. With so many status bar applications available, you can customize this section of the macOS menu bar and arrange the items in any order to best complement your workflow. However, if you cannot find a status bar application that addresses a specific aspect of your workflow, such as aggregating and displaying relevant information about the status of jobs triggered by a CI build pipeline, then you can build your own status bar application with React Native for macOS . Unlike a desktop application, building a status bar application involves quite a few steps beyond the installation steps listed in the React Native for macOS documentation .

Did you know Slack 's and Discord 's desktop clients are built with the Electron framework? Using Electron allows developers to bring their web applications to desktop faster without having to rewrite them completely as standalone, native clients that run on multiple operating systems. However, a major downside of building desktop applications with Electron is its high memory consumption and size because it packages the final build with a copy of Chromium, an open-source alternative of the Chrome browser, and Node.js to run an application written with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. At a high level, an Electron application behaves like a Chrome browser and loads and renders an HTML document inside of a window ( BrowserWindow ). To avoid the extra overhead of Chromium and Node.js and make the UI appear consistent with a platform's trademark design by rendering it with native APIs and components, consider using a different framework like React Native for Windows and macOS . Launched in 2019 and forked from Facebook's React Native project, React Native for Windows and macOS is an open source project maintained by Microsoft and allows developers to create Windows and macOS applications with a single React Native codebase. To interact with native APIs, the macOS port uses Objective-C or Swift while the Windows port uses C# or C++/WinRT. React Native for Windows and macOS comes with React components that are transformed into native components of each platform at runtime and can readily be imported from the react-native library. Composing an interface with native components instead of wrapping an entire web application inside of an application shell results in faster and smaller desktop applications. With all the tooling and CLI utilities provided by React Native for Windows and macOS, a developer can easily get started and deliver an application with a solid desktop experience.