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 9. Getting More from Interface Builder

This chapter is about making your life with Interface Builder (IB) a little more comfortable. Although it is possible to write a complete app without doing any work in IB, it's fair to say that most projects are completed with at least some help from the editor that Apple likes to claim meets all your user-interface design needs. Sometimes, it even does.

The main challenge with Interface Builder is the sheer amount of information it holds. A storyboard may contain scores of View Controllers, navigation, and tab controllers; views may be nested deep inside a hierarchy of other views, some of which are never even visible, and increasingly, interfaces are built with a large number of separate storyboards.

Maintaining a clear overview of a project can become quite tricky, but there are a number of things we can do to make all of the challenges listed above more manageable, without compromising our design and development flow.

In this chapter, you will...