Book Image

Learning Xcode 8

By : Jak Tiano
Book Image

Learning Xcode 8

By: Jak Tiano

Overview of this book

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a breakthrough in mobile computing and the birth of world-changing mobile apps. With a reputation as one of the most user-centric and developer-friendly platforms, iOS is the best place to launch your next great app idea. As the official tool to create iOS applications, Xcode is chock full of features aimed at making a developer’s job easier, faster, and more fun. This book will take you from complete novice to a published app developer, and covers every step in between. You’ll learn the basics of iOS application development by taking a guided tour through the Xcode software and Swift programming language, before putting that knowledge to use by building your first app called “Snippets.” Over the course of the book, you will continue to explore the many facets of iOS development in Xcode by adding new features to your app, integrating gestures and sensors, and even creating an Apple Watch companion app. You’ll also learn how to use the debugging tools, write unit tests, and optimize and distribute your app. By the time you make it to the end of this book, you will have successfully built and published your first iOS application.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Learning Xcode 8
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating builds


When the time comes to actually build your project, you'll find there are a number of features and options to think about. Later in the book we'll take a look at creating distribution builds, but for now let's look at what it takes to understand the basics, and get development builds on our devices.

Build and run

First, let's discuss the only part of the Xcode window we haven't looked at yet: the main toolbar. Earlier we used the buttons on the right side of the toolbar, but we haven't looked at what's happening on the left:

Figure 2.23: The build options and commands in the upper left of the Xcode toolbar

The four buttons along the top (from left to right) are the build and run button, the stop process button, target selection, and platform selection. With these buttons, you can run most of the development builds you'll need.

To test this, let's run our project on the iPhone SE simulator. First, click on the platform selection button. You'll find that it's not a button, but a...