I learned Cocoa a little less than 2 decades ago when we had no storyboard, no autolayout, no NSViewController (and no installed NSWindowController!). I miss the simplicity of the default Cocoa Application project template where just adding NSObject subclasses to the MainMenu.xib was enough to instantiate them at runtime. This was convenient and really easy to learn.

Today, I'm also a Cocoa trainer and I can't explain Storyboards, Autolayout, NSViewController/UIViewController on day one to the students, when they hardly know what ObjC runtime is and what alloc+init does. To reduce the learning curve and hook them as soon as possible to Cocoa, i've customized some Xcode templates for a kickstart dive in Cocoa programming.

Xcode-custom-templates

Various Xcode custom templates, targeting minimalistic content (No Storyboard, No Autolayout...) used for my trainings. The generated xcodeproj is aimed at very simple, short life apps.

Cocoa Application (Minimalist) template:

Install in ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/Templates/Project Templates/Mac/Application/

• No default Storyboard (use MainMenu.xib instead)
• No Autolayout set by default
• A mininimal AppDelegate implementation (with a property for the main window)
• ObjC and Swift compatible
• Xcode 8.3 compatible

Known issues: some of the Swift build settings may not be up to date, so don't use advanced Swift :) I would not advise using this template to build an app that you'll maintain in the long term.

Cocoa Doc Based App (Storyboard?) template:

Install in ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/Templates/Project Templates/Mac/Application/

• Basically the Cocoa Application template from Xcode 7.1.1
• Document Based Application checkbox! (autosavesInPlace set to NO)
• No default Storyboard (use MainMenu.xib instead), but a checkbox is available!
• No Autolayout set by default
• ObjC and Swift compatible
• Xcode 8.3 compatible

Use without any restriction.