Example of Personal Development Plan for iOS developers, who want to code for mac.

PDP.md

Personal Development Plan

Duration: 3 months

Long-term Professional Goal

Anticipate upcoming iOS and macOS platforms converging.

Short-term Professional Goal

Master development for a new platform: macOS.

Activities to archieve the goals

Theory

1. View Programming Guide

View Programming Guide helps to understand difference between UIView and NSView.

Spend 2 hours a day.

Duration: approx. 4 days (depending if you read references, practice or not)

2. Crafting Modern Cocoa Apps

WWDC 2016 video Crafting Modern Cocoa Apps is a short introduction into best practices and main technologies, that should be used while building macOS apps.

Duration: 1h

3. App Sandbox Design Guide

App Sandbox Design Guide is a reference to the restrictions, put on an application by a system daemon sandboxd.

Apps can be distributed both via App Store and without it, so they can be sandboxed or not. It is important to understand the difference.

Duration: 4h

Practice

Choose 1a or 1b. Or mix them!

1a. Cocoa Programming playlist from Apple Programming youtube channel by Lucas Derraugh.

Cocoa Programming contains 66 videos. The very first video has been made in far year of 2011 and the last one — in 2015, but until now I consider it being the best free Cocoa tutorials. Short and concise, each of them explaines in a great practical way how to implement some app feature for mac.

Watch 2 videos every working day.

Duration: 1.5–2 months

1b. Ray Wenderlich's macOS tutorials

Well-known Ray Wenderlich's website has a nice section with macOS tutorials. I would suggest to pick lessons about macOS specifics (Bindings, Drag & Drop, making a menu bar application, NSTask, Outline view, NSCollectionView(one, two))

Try 1 tutorial in 2 days.

Duration: approx. 1 month

2. Publishing an application to the Mac App Store.

Develop and publish a Pomodoro timer or an RSS Reader.

Duration: 1 month