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

Enumerations


Swift offers another valuable structure, the Enum. While enumerations are a common feature of programming languages, Swift's Enum offers very much more than a simple mapping of integer values to labels.

Firstly, in cases where there is no logical mapping of Enum values to integers (or values of any other type), we can declare an Enum to be a type in its own right:

enum Color 
{ 
    case red 
    case amber 
    case green 
} 

So, here we have a case in which it would be nonsensical to map colors to integers. Swift will not allow us to try to derive some integer value from Color.red, either.

Note that the Enum name is capitalized, whereas a case is written in lowercase.

Note

This was not the case (no pun intended) in previous versions of Swift--another thing to be wary of when reading older posts, tutorials, and documentation.

There are, however, frequent uses for an Enum that do correspond to some underlying value, and Swift lets us do this, too:

enum Medal: Int 
{ 
    case gold ...