Programming iOS 6, 3rd Edition

The Documentation Window

Your primary access to the documentation is in Xcode, through the Documentation tab of the Organizer window (Window → Organizer and then click Documentation, or Help → Documentation and API Reference). I’ll refer to this as the documentation window, even though it’s really an aspect of the Organizer window.

The documentation window behaves basically as a glorified web browser, because the documentation consists essentially of web pages. Indeed, most of the same pages can be accessed at Apple’s developer site, http://developer.apple.com. And any page open in the documentation window can be opened instead in your web browser: Control-click for the contextual menu and choose Open Page in Browser. Notice too the contextual menu for links within a documentation window, such as Copy Link and Open Link in Browser. When you’re trying to figure something out, the ability to spawn off a page as a secondary window in a browser while you go on searching in the Xcode documentation window can be very useful.

Each doc set has a home page, which you access from the Browse navigator (Editor → Explore Documentation) or from the first component of the jump bar. A typical home page presents a full list of documents, which can be sorted by column and filtered by keyword. Some home pages, such as the iOS 6.1 Documentation Set home page, also have a broad categorical list down the left side, which can similarly be used to filter the document list. In practice I rarely use these ...