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

Why code instead of IB?


There are several reasons why we may need, or choose, to create a user interface in code, rather than using Interface Builder:

  • It may be necessary to configure the interface according to runtime criteria. The user may perhaps be given a choice of how the interface is presented, for example, or the number of some UI elements may depend on data that cannot be foreseen at compile time.
  • Code is easier to read than a storyboard. To find out all the property values of an interface built with Interface Builder requires endless clicking on the various panes and inspectors. Reading through the same properties set in code, on the other hand, will generally entail no more than scanning over a few classes.
  • Code shows structure. The interaction and relationships between the various elements of the interface are written explicitly into the code, with no behind-the-curtains magic being supplied by the IB development team.
  • To code it is to understand it. However adept we may become at...