Book Image

Xcode 6 Essentials

By : Jayant Varma
Book Image

Xcode 6 Essentials

By: Jayant Varma

Overview of this book

<p>Apple made their iOS devices easy to use and now they have extended that to their development tools such as Xcode. In Xcode, you can create native applications in the easiest way. Apple's new Xcode technology is making the development curve smoother with its easy-to-develop features and enhancements.</p> <p>Xcode can now write code with the performance-upgraded, brand new, innovative language called Swift, so you no longer need to rely on third-party frameworks to create applications.</p> <p>The book gives you a tour of the new features of Xcode 6. It introduces some important aspects such as the Swift language and its Playgrounds with visual live coding, creating interfaces, storyboards, controllers, frameworks, and live previews. Diving more into the subject, this books shows you how to debug your code, and how to build and test the application on a device or the simulator.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

The Apple development languages


We need to choose a language to write our code in. Till now, developing for an Apple device was synonymous with Objective-C. It is something that has carried on from the days of NeXT. Now Apple has boldly offered a new modern language alternative, unveiled at WWDC 2014, called Swift. All developers that used Xcode till now used Objective-C for development. From now on, Apple is offering the choice to use either Swift or Objective-C as the language to develop with. In the future, there might be just one or there could be more languages, for now, we have these options. We shall focus on Swift as the language of choice for the remaining chapters. Do not worry if you have no idea about Swift, because in the next chapter we shall have a crash course on Swift. Enough swift to get you started up and running.

Swift

In simple terms, Swift is a language that closely reads like a scripting language in comparison to many of the C and C++ variants. Of the long list of advantages...