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

Enumerations as data structures


Although we have already seen in Chapter 2, Basic Swift, that enum in Swift goes a lot further than merely representing integers with more memorable symbols; we have only just scratched the surface. The enum in Swift is so powerful that its use encroaches far into terrain that once belonged exclusively to heavyweight data structures such as classes.

Note

For that reason, enum plays a huge part in Swift; give yourself some time to play around with them, and start to uncover the many ways in which they can offer a lightweight and clear option for structuring your data.

In this section, we'll look at three areas that are particularly powerful, one of which we might not expect to associate with an enum:

  • enum methods
  • Associated types
  • Recursive enum definitions

Adding methods to enums

The first feature of a Swift enum that makes them so much more than just names of integer values (or any other type) is the ability to add methods to them.

Let us create an enum of traffic...