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

Strings and characters


At an intuitive level, we understand text to consist of words that themselves consist of letters, all chained together in some meaningful fashion (Dr. Seuss books and the poetry of E.E. Cummings excepted). However, the further we look into the technicalities of providing the user with numerous alphabets, symbols, and emojis, the more we realize that this simple intuitive perception of text hides a large number of issues that we, as developers, must grapple with.

Drawing text using default fonts and styles is very easy. But the more we understand about strings and text, the better we are equipped to make use of the rich set of tools at our disposal. And toolsets don't come much richer than macOS.

What is a String in Swift?

A Swift String is a struct that adopts the Equatable and Comparable protocols (as well as several others). As all structs, it is passed by value. It has a CharacterView property (with which we will seldom interact explicitly), which is a collection ...