iOS 6 Foundations

chapter two

Getting Up to Speed with Xcode

You’ll be spending a lot of time with Xcode, the integrated development environment (IDE) for iOS and OS X. Xcode is one of the three interlocking pieces of iOS development (the other two are the Cocoa Touch framework and the Objective-C language). This chapter guides you through using Xcode. In Chapter 1, “Getting Started with iOS 6,” you saw the basics of how to create a new project with Xcode (refer to “Installing and Using Xcode” in Chapter 1). You even created a fairly complex project from a template and ran it with a click of the Run button.

Now it’s time to look deeper into Xcode. In this chapter, you’ll look at the Xcode interface and the tools that are available to you. By the end of this chapter, words and phrases such as “project,” “workspace window,” “navigator,” “inspector,” “library,” and “utilities” will be familiar to you, and you’ll see how to use these Xcode tools.

One chapter—or even one book—can provide just an introduction to Xcode. Bear in mind that Xcode is used internally by the engineers at Apple for the software that they build. This means that it’s designed not only to help you build your own apps, but it’s also designed to let the engineers build OS X and iOS, too, along with other Apple software such as the iWork suite, iBooks Author, and the built-in iOS apps such as Messages, Calendar, and Reminders. You don’t have to worry about getting stuck building a project that outpaces Xcode.

Many tools for analyzing ...