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

Checking out Xcode's debugging tools


Xcode has come a long way since its modest beginnings, and offers us a comprehensive suite of features and applications designed to make debugging code as painless as possible. All of the tools and techniques we will cover in this chapter are available without leaving Xcode, although some of the tools we will discuss are also available on the command--line, but we'll cover that in a later chapter.

We will also leave utility applications such as Instruments for later.

For now, it's Xcode all the way.

Debug area

Let's start with using the so-called debug area to the fullest.

This is the area of the Xcode window that consists of the debug console, and the variables view. We have used the console extensively throughout this book, but there are many tricks left that we have not yet uncovered. However, we will start with the variables view, which offers us a lot more help in debugging our code than you might be aware of.

To show and hide the debug area, type Command...