iOS 11 Programming Fundamentals with Swift

Chapter 10. Cocoa Classes

When you program iOS, you’re programming Cocoa. The Cocoa API is written mostly in Objective-C, and Cocoa itself consists mostly of Objective-C classes, derived from the root class, NSObject. When programming iOS, you’ll be making heavy use of the built-in Cocoa classes.

This chapter introduces Cocoa’s class structure and explains how you’ll interact with it as an iOS programmer. It discusses how Cocoa is conceptually organized, in terms of its underlying Objective-C features, and then surveys some of the most commonly encountered Cocoa utility classes, concluding with a discussion of the Cocoa root class and its features, which are inherited by all Cocoa classes.

Subclassing

Cocoa effectively hands you a large repertory of objects that already know how to behave in certain desirable ways. A UIButton, for example, knows how to draw itself and how to respond when the user taps it; a UITextField knows how to display editable text, how to summon the keyboard, and how to accept keyboard input.

Often, the default behavior or appearance of an object supplied by Cocoa won’t be quite what you’re after, and you’ll want to customize it. This does not necessarily mean that you need to subclass! Cocoa classes are heavily endowed with methods that you can call, and properties that you can set, precisely in order to customize an instance, and these will be your first resort. Always study the documentation for a Cocoa class to see whether instances can already be made ...