Cocoa Touch

Cocoa Touch

Developer(s)	Apple Inc.
Operating system	Mac OS X
Type	Software framework
License	Proprietary
Website	developer.apple.com

Cocoa Touch is an API for building software programs to run on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad from Apple Inc.

Cocoa Touch provides an abstraction layer of iOS, the operating system for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Cocoa Touch is based on the Mac OS X 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 Mac OS X computers and are thus unique to the iOS range of devices. Just like Cocoa, Cocoa Touch follows a Model-View-Controller (MVC) software architecture.

Tools for developing applications based on Cocoa Touch are included in the iOS SDK.

Cocoa Touch in relation to other iOS layers

iOS technologies can be seen as a set of layers, with Cocoa Touch at the highest level and the Core OS and Mac OS X kernel at the bottom. This allows many sophisticated services and technologies to be implemented easily, reducing the amount of work developers would have if they were using lower level layers. However, lower level layers may still be accessed by the developer when needed.

A hierarchical view of the iOS technologies can be shown as:

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

Main Features

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

• Core Animation
• Multitasking
• Gesture Recognizers

Main Frameworks

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

• Foundation Kit Framework
• UIKit Framework (based on Application Kit)
• Game Kit Framework
• iAd Framework
• Map Kit Framework

External links

• Apple's iPhone Developer Center
• Apple Developer Centre - Cocoa Touch
• Apple's iOS Reference Library - Cocoa Touch Layer