Book Image

Mastering macOS Programming.

By : Stuart Grimshaw, Gregory Casamento
Book Image

Mastering macOS Programming.

By: Stuart Grimshaw, Gregory Casamento

Overview of this book

macOS continues to lead the way in desktop operating systems, with its tight integration across the Apple ecosystem of platforms and devices. With this book, you will get an in-depth knowledge of working on macOS, enabling you to unleash the full potential of the latest version using Swift 3 to build applications. This book will help you broaden your horizons by taking your programming skills to next level. The initial chapters will show you all about the environment that surrounds a developer at the start of a project. It introduces you to the new features that Swift 3 and Xcode 8 offers and also covers the common design patterns that you need to know for planning anything more than trivial projects. You will then learn the advanced Swift programming concepts, including memory management, generics, protocol orientated and functional programming and with this knowledge you will be able to tackle the next several chapters that deal with Apple’s own Cocoa frameworks. It also covers AppKit, Foundation, and Core Data in detail which is a part of the Cocoa umbrella framework. The rest of the book will cover the challenges posed by asynchronous programming, error handling, debugging, and many other areas that are an indispensable part of producing software in a professional environment. By the end of this book, you will be well acquainted with Swift, Cocoa, and AppKit, as well as a plethora of other essential tools, and you will be ready to tackle much more complex and advanced software projects.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface
18
LLDB and the Command Line

Saving text to the Documents folder


We started with UserDefaults because you are likely to have used them before. Most tutorials that deal with data storage start with text. This is true for most platforms; macOS is no exception, and this section will bring us up to speed with the ease with which we can store text files.

Foundation String objects provide methods for storing and loading text data. The text can be stored in a number of common formats, meaning that we can store text files that can be read by other programs, and of course, reading in different formats allows us to load text files that have been created outside our app. Once we have the path of the file to be saved, storing or loading is just a couple of lines of code.

We'll start with a text file IO extension to CustomFileManager.

Create an extension and helper function

Keeping the code tidy, we'll create a new extension to the CustomFileManager, to which we'll directly add a helper function that will return a URL at which we will...