iOS 14 Programming Fundamentals with Swift

Chapter 6. Anatomy of an Xcode Project

Xcode is the application used to develop an iOS app. An Xcode project is the source for an app; it’s the entire collection of files and settings used to construct the app. To create, develop, and maintain an app, it helps to know how to manipulate and navigate an Xcode project. You’ll want to be familiar with Xcode, and you’ll need to know about the nature and structure of Xcode projects and how Xcode shows them to you. That’s the subject of this chapter.

Xcode is a powerful, complex, and very large program. Our survey will chart a safe, restricted, and essential path, focusing on aspects of Xcode that you most need to understand immediately, and resolutely ignoring everything else.

Note

The term “Xcode” is used in two ways. It’s the name of the application in which you edit and build your app, and it’s the name of an entire suite of utilities that accompanies it; in the latter sense, Instruments and the Simulator are part of Xcode. This ambiguity should generally present little difficulty.

New Project

Even before you’ve written any code, an Xcode project is quite elaborate. To see this, let’s make a new, essentially “empty” project; you’ll find that it isn’t empty at all.

1. Start up Xcode and choose File → New → Project.

2. The “Choose a template” dialog appears. The template is your project’s initial set of files and settings. When you pick a template, you’re really picking an existing folder full of files; this folder is hidden deep inside ...