iPad Application Development For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Accessing Documentation

The ability to quickly access documentation is a major feature of Xcode, and one you’ll want to use regularly. If you have no idea how to do something, or how something works, you can often find the answer in the documentation.

Being able to figure out what’s going on will make your life easier. You saw that Xcode will complete your code for you, which is useful when you can’t quite remember the method signature and parameters, but what if you don’t even have a clue?

Or like many developers, you may find yourself wanting to dig deeper when it comes to a particular bit of code. That’s when you’ll really appreciate things like Xcode’s Quick Help, the Documentation pane in the Organizer window, header file access, the Help menu, and the Find tools. With these tools, you can quickly access the documentation for a particular class, method, or property.

Getting Xcode help

To see how easy it is to access the documentation, say that you’ve selected RTMasterViewController.h, as shown in the preceding Figure 7-8. (I’ve hidden the Assistant to have more room). What if you wanted to find out more about UITableViewController, the super class of RTMasterViewController?

The Quick Help section of the Utility area provides documentation for a single symbol. (To see the Utility area, click the rightmost view selector button in the top-right corner of the Workspace window ...