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

Using UserDefaults


The name UserDefaults rather undersells the wide range of uses for which this feature of the Foundation framework is suitable. Any data that is reasonably simply structured can be stored with very little code in UserDefaults, and there is no limit to the amount of data that can be stored (apart from the obvious limit to the device's storage).

However, if you're storing large amounts of data, we'll be looking at more suitable alternatives later in this chapter, and in the next.

UserDefaults can save the following data types:

  • Bool
  • Number types
  • Array
  • Dictionary

Other types can be stored if they can be coded into Data type objects:

  • Data

Foundation also provides convenience methods for the following commonly stored types that need serializing first:

  • Date
  • String
  • URL

For the UserDefaults, we will create an extension.

Add an extension code to the CustomFileManager class:

extension CustomFileManager 
{ 
} 

Storage of simple objects

We will start with storing and retrieving simple Foundation objects...