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

Chapter 8. Strings and Text

Ever since Charles Babbage's amazing difference engine, computers have communicated with homo sapiens using text. It's true the Starship Enterprise's bridge was full of lights flashing across the screens, but the only one who ever needed to understand anything was Spock, and he stared into that little glowing monitor; and I'm guessing it displayed text.

A few years after that, Steve Jobs got the idea in his head that computers should not just produce text, they should produce beautiful text, and desktop publishing was born.

Within a few years of that, we were all spending huge amounts of time reading computer-generated text, on our desks, on our laps, and then on our phones; and we wanted it as cool and glossy as the most sophisticated magazines in print.

As a result, the presentation of text has become an essential part of writing software, at least for anyone writing desktop programs. As a macOS developer, you're in the company of people who produce the most elegant...