Mastering macOS Programming

Title Page

Mastering macOS Programming

Combine macOS programming with Cocoa and Swift 3 to build powerful applications

Stuart Grimshaw

       BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Copyright

Mastering macOS Programming

Copyright © 2017 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: May 2017

Production reference: 1300517

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78646-169-8

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Credits

About the Author

Stuart Grimshaw has programmed for Apple computers since the days before OS X and has been involved with developing for the Apple Watch since its release. Born in the UK and having lived in Germany and the Netherlands, he is currently a freelance iOS/tvOS/macOS developer in Auckland, New Zealand, where he works on some of Australia-New Zealand's largest video and TV delivery apps and leads the research and development of both watchOS and tvOS applications. He is passionate about the potential of the Apple Watch and Apple TV, as well as Apple's Swift programming language, and is a keen proponent of beach coding.

About the Reviewer

Fernando Rodríguez has more than 20 years of experience in developing and teaching other developers. Although he currently specializes in the Apple stack of tools, he’s a nerd of all trades with a strong interest in big data and automated trading.

He has taught iOS development at the Big Nerd Ranch, Udacity, and Keepcoding, ranging from Facebook developers to indie devs.

He was awarded as an Outstanding instructor at Udemy for his introductory course to iOS development. This course was mentioned in the Financial Times, Venture beat, and InformationWeek.

Code long and prosper!

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Dedication

For Jane.

And because this book is twice as thick as the last one, for my mum too.

Table of Contents

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

Hello macOS

It's going to be Swift

And more than Swift

It's going to be Xcode and more

Prerequisites

The book's overall structure

How Unix, macOS, Cocoa, and AppKit fit together

Darwin

macOS

Cocoa

Harnessing that power

The serious developer's toolkit

What you'll get from this book

Summary

Basic Swift

Variables and types

Number types

Integers

Booleans

Strings

Printing to the console

Comments

Arrays, dictionaries, and sets

Arrays

Dictionaries

Sets

Naming of types and variables

Type aliases

Value and reference types

Operators

Mathematical operators

Augmented assignment

Comparison operators

Logical operators

Other standard operators

Ternary operator

Nil-coalescing operator

Structs, classes, and other data structures

Structs

Classes

Optional instances

Tuples

Enumerations

Optionals

Why use optionals?

Unwrapping an optional

Control flow

if else

switch

Loops

Saying goodbye to i++

Iterating with for loops

while

Functions

Summary

Checking Out the Power of Xcode

A quick and simple sketch app

Speeding it up with code snippets

Checking out the supplied snippets

Usage

Rolling your own snippets

Logging with special literals

Getting the most out of breakpoints

Editing breakpoint options

Other actions

Adding a debugger command

Triggering an AppleScript or shell script

Don't stop me now

Behaviors

Understanding schemes

What schemes actually do

Creating a new scheme

Using scheme environment variables

Why build configs are so cool

Creating a new build configuration

Creating user-defined build settings

Adapting the Info.plist file

Using Swift compiler custom flags

Creating the custom flag

Using custom flags in code

Finding the build settings on disk

Summary

MVC and Other Design Patterns

Programming paradigms

So, what is meant by paradigm?

Imperative

Object-oriented programming

Class-based programming

Protocol-oriented programming

The drawbacks of OOP

Declarative programming

Understanding functional programming

Using functional concepts within OOP

Learning functional programming the fast way

Encapsulation

Separation of concerns

Simplification

A path through the forest

Functions

Data flow

Objects

Design patterns

Summary

Advanced Swift

Control flow

Using switch

Compound cases

Tuple matching

Value binding

Using the where keyword

Control transfer statements

The break statement

The fallthrough statement

The guard statement

Functions

Arguments

Default arguments

Anonymous arguments

Variadic arguments

Function overloading

Function naming in Swift 3.0

First class functions

Functions are typed

Closures

Closures that take arguments

Closures with multiple arguments

Alternative closure syntax

Closures are functions; functions are closures

Using map, reduce, and filter

Map with arrays

Map with dictionaries

reduce

filter

Nesting and chaining map, reduce, and filter

Nesting

Chaining

Enumerations as data structures

Adding methods to enums

Associated values

Grouping together different data types

Creating multiple distinct types from a single type

Mixed type arrays, anybody?

Recursive definitions

Making constants with an enum

Replacing classes

Protocols

Declaring method requirements

Conforming to a protocol

Protocol advantages over classes

Extending existing types with a protocol

Creating collections of mixed types

Protocols can conform to protocols

Declaring required properties

Implementing required properties

Class-only protocols

Class considerations

Protocol composition

Customizing operators

Adding operator implementations to types

Equivalence

Custom operators

Defining a custom operator

Prefix operators

Postfix operators

Infix operators

Implementing a custom operator

Collection types

Arrays

Comparing arrays

Mutating an array

Using arrays to create new arrays

Testing array elements

Removing elements from an array

Methods that mutate and return a value

Mutating non-returning methods

Sorting arrays

Dictionaries

Accessing all keys or values

Mutating dictionaries

Removing dictionary elements

Optionals

Conditional downcasting

Unwrapping optionals with guard

Implicitly unwrapped optionals

Summary

Cocoa Frameworks - The Backbone of Your Apps

Understanding Foundation Kit

Understanding NSObject

Import statements

Leveraging key-value observing

Coding for KVO

KVO - compliant classes

Adding the observer

Reacting to value changes

Removing the observer

Trying it out

Modifying ViewController

Cocoa bindings

Adding the data model

Adding an NSArrayController

Binding the table view

Binding the table selection

Adding the binding

Adding and binding a text field

Changing array values

Pretty Boolean

Summary

Creating Views Programmatically

Why code instead of IB?

Setting our goals

The steps involved

Beyond the visuals

Coding a table view

Preparing the View Controller

The table and label

Adding the table

Configuring the table's columns

Adding the info label

Providing the app with data

Importing the Person class

The data model

Creating a property list with XML

Getting data from the property list

Adopting datasource and delegate protocols

Datasource extension

Delegate extension

Returning table view columns

Reacting to selection events

Observing without bindings

Adding KVO to the View Controller

Adding an observer

Handling changes in the data

Removing an observer

Triggering changes to the data

Advantages of KVO in code

The final line of code

Adding further control elements in code

Adding the sort button

Implementing a button's action

Running the app

Summary

Strings and Text

Strings and characters

What is a String in Swift?

What is a Character?

Unicode compliance

Combining strings and characters

String indices and subranges

Obtaining a String.Index

Obtaining a subrange

Modifying strings

Removing characters

Inserting characters

String interpolation

Writing long strings

Escape characters

Other representations

C strings

NSString

Some NSString gotchas

Indexing

Mutability

Value and reference

String comparison

Formatting strings

Formatting using fonts

Formatting using NSMutableAttributedString

Adding an attribute

Multiple attributes

Links in text

Styles and effects

NSTextView

The MVC pattern of text views

NSTextStorage

NSTextContainer

NSLayoutManager

Custom text view

Creating the custom storage class

Creating the custom text view

Summary

Getting More from Interface Builder

Advanced IB navigation

The little-known HUD

Showing all views under the cursor

Debug View Hierarchy

Controlling the amount of information

Other view settings

Wireframe view

Zooming

Showing constraints

Encapsulating views with NSStackView

Taming the storyboard

Refactoring large storyboards

Under the hood of a storyboard

Summary

Drawing on the Strength of Core Graphics

Why not use an image?

Why not use native views?

Core Graphics and AppKit drawing

Using AppKit

Using Core Graphics

Which to use

Creating custom views

Custom buttons

Defining the custom button's properties

Overriding the button's draw method

Filling a path

Stroking a path

Drawing the icon with code

Adding an alternative icon

Testing the button

Dial clock

Creating a custom view with AppKit

Overriding the custom view's draw method

Drawing arcs

Drawing the outline

Adding the fill color

Adding the minutes curve

Adding the hours curve

Correcting the order of drawing

Pie clock

Creating a custom view with Core Graphics

Understanding CGContext

Why do we need a graphics context?

Understanding the CG coordinates system

Creating the custom class

Overriding the class's draw method

The draw method

The drawFace method

Adding a gradient with AppKit

The drawMinutes method

Adding a gradient with Core Graphics

Adding more color locations

The drawHours method

Context translation

Context rotation

Translating the context

Rotating the text

Adding the hour displacement

Adding shadows

Context scaling

Summary

Core Animation

What is Core Animation?

Where does Core Animation fit in?

Layer backed and layer hosting

Drawing, then animating

Introducing CALayer

Creating a project

Adding a custom view

Extending CGColor

Preparing the ViewController class

Adding a button in code

Building CALayer objects

Adding CA sublayers

Exploring glows and shadows

Adding a CAShapeLayer

CAShapeLayer properties

CGPaths

Adding CA transformations

Rotating a layer in 3D

Using CATextLayer

Animating CALayer objects

CA implicit animations

CA explicit animations

CABasicAnimation

CABasicAnimation and the view model

Delaying an animation

Using CAKeyframeAnimation

Controlling animations with CAAnimationGroup

Wrapping changes in CATransaction objects

Affine transformation

Adding CATransaction completion blocks

Nesting CATransaction blocks

Two-and-a-half dimensional animations

Adding perspective

Getting even closer to 3D

Introducing CATransformLayer

Composing CALayers onto CATransformLayer

Rotating the CATransformLayer

Adding 3D animation

Animating NSViews

Summary

Handling Errors Gracefully

Errors aren't mistakes

Expecting the unexpected

Optionals

Explicit error handling

Swift error handling

The four ways of handling errors

Error types

Creating the simplest Error enum

Creating a better Error enum

Throwing an error

Handling an error

The error life cycle

Asserting that the error will not occur

Handling the error as an optional value

Handling an error with do-catch

Pattern matching

Matching associated values

Propagating an error

Propagation - case study: handling in scope

Propagation - case study: propagation

Verbose errors

Anything can be an error

NSError handling

Anatomy of an NSError

Catching NSErrors

Pattern-matched Cocoa catches

Creating NSError instances in Swift

Summary

Persistent Storage

Creating a project

Creating the project's file manager

Using UserDefaults

Storage of simple objects

Storing simple objects

Using the synchronize method

Loading simple objects

Testing the code

Storing structured data

Saving structured data

Loading structured data

Testing the code

Loading by type

Testing the code

UserDefaults convenience methods

Saving with convenience methods

Loading the data

Testing the code

Security considerations

Saving text to the Documents folder

Create an extension and helper function

Storing textual data

Testing the save function

Loading text files

Testing the load function

NSCoding/NSKeyedArchiver

Creating an NSCoding--compliant class

Handling NSCoding--compliant objects

Saving NSCoding--compliant objects

Loading NSCoding--compliant objects

Testing the code

More complex objects

Presenting open and save dialog boxes

Summary

The Benefits of Core Data

What Core Data is, and isn't

Elements of a Core Data model

Entities

Attributes

Relationships

Core Data, Cocoa Bindings, and no code

Create the project

Create a simple UI in Interface Builder

Adding the necessary UI objects to the Scene

Add an Array Controller

Setting up the data model

Preparing the View Controller

Connecting up to the storyboard

Connecting the buttons

Connecting the Array Controller

Setting up the table columns

Connecting the Table Cell Views

Connecting the text fields

Using our data model

Using NSPersistenceContainer

Adding an NSPersistentContainer instance

Delete the unneeded properties

Replacing references to the context

Creating a data manager class

Non-string entity attributes

Creating entity instances

What is a managed object context?

Fetching data

Adding relationships between entities

One-to-one relationships

One-to-many relationships

Adding relationships to the crew

Same thing, the other way around

Sorted fetches

Sorting in the table view

Predicate fetching

Using other predicates

Searching for a string

Searching for a case - insensitive string

Combining predicates

Relationship predicates

Deleting the red guy

More about Core Data

The Core Data stack

NSManagedObjectModel

NSManagedObjectContext

NSPersistentStoreCoordinator

Does app X really need Core Data?

The pros

The cons

Making that decision

Summary

Connect to the World - Networking

Patterns for downloading data

Simplicity

Control

Downloading using closures

Starting a local test server on your machine

Starting the server

Creating a JSON file

Testing the server

Implementing an HTTP request manager

The web as an asynchronous entity

The simplest request possible

The completion handler

Improving the simplest request possible

Customizing URLSessionConfiguration properties

Customizing URLRequest properties

Customizing URLSessionTask properties

Downloading using a URLSession delegate

Adding HTTP compatibility to the app

Creating a simple UI

Creating the manager

Creating a session delegate class

URLSessionDownloadDelegate methods

Handling the data

Catching errors

Getting progress information

Canceling a download

URLSessionTaskDelegate methods

Adding suspend and resume

No third-party frameworks?

The URLSession framework

URLSessionTasks

Ephemeral sessions

Cache rewards

Using different request cache policies

Summary

Concurrency and Asynchronous Programming

Concurrency and asynchronicity

Concurrency

Concurrency and parallelism

Multithreading

Multiprocessing

Threads, and why you don't need to worry

Asynchronicity

The challenges of asynchronous programming

Dependencies, and why you don't need to worry

Operation framework

Understanding operations and queues

Basic use of an OperationQueue

Adding dependencies to BlockOperations

More BlockOperation features

BlockOperation completion blocks

Defining a custom Operation object

Concurrent and non-concurrent operations

Defining non-concurrent custom operations

Defining concurrent custom operations

Summary

Understanding Xcodes Debugging Tools

Checking out Xcode's debugging tools

Debug area

Variables view

Using Quicklook

Console view

Debugging in the navigator area

Debug navigator

Hiding and showing additional information

Changing the process view

Breakpoint navigator

Report navigator

Leveraging breakpoints

Different types of breakpoint

Swift error breakpoints

Symbolic breakpoints

Other breakpoint types

Adding and removing breakpoints

Editing breakpoints

Conditions

Ignore

Adding an action to a breakpoint

Log message

Debugger Command

Shell Command

AppleScript

We can also get a little more ambitious with these actions

Sounds

Multiple actions

Breakpoint control flow

Debugger control

Close

Enable

Continue

Step over

Step into

Step out

Trying them out

Summary

LLDB and the Command Line

LLDB

Using LLDB

Debugging line-by-line

Continue

Step over

Step into

Step out

Trying it out

Enable

Printing in LLDB

Preparing classes for LLDB descriptions

Stop hooks

Printing formatted numbers

Executing code from LLDB

Type lookups

Breakpoints in LLDB

Adding a breakpoint

Breakpoint list

Attaching commands to breakpoints

Creating a Swift Error breakpoint

Naming breakpoints

Watchpoints

Adding conditions and commands

Watchpoint lists

Enabling, disabling, and deleting watchpoints

Persistent customization

Getting help in LLBD

Using shell commands in LLDB

REPL in LLDB

Switching between LLDB and Swift REPL

Leaving a REPL session

Using Python in LLDB

Accessing program variables from Python

Switching between LLDB and Python REPL

One liners from LLDB to Python

Getting help in Python

Altogether now

Standalone LLDB

Running Xcode projects in a standalone LLDB session

Differences between standalone and Xcode LLDB

Summary

Deploying Third - Party Code

Common use cases

Distribution methods

Third - party source code

Third - party libraries

Third-party frameworks

But the Internet says...

Pros and cons

The case for third - party code

The case against

The take-away

A case study

Leaving it till later

Different installation methods

Manual source code integration

Downloading the ZIP

Cloning the repo

Preparing to clone

Installing Homebrew

Installing Git

Cloning the repository

Importing the source code

Swift Package Manager

SPM products

Adding the package to an Xcode project

Over to Xcode

Package baggage

Other package managers

Cocoapods

Carthage

The price of complexity

Summary

Wrapping It Up

App distribution

The right settings on project creation

The product name

Team

The Organization Identifier

Bundle ID

Setting up the project

Setting the Application Category

Enabling sandboxing

Your developer account

Registering an app ID

Providing the required icons

Archiving the app

Validating the archive

Uploading to the App Store

Creating app records in iTunes Connect

Uploading from Xcode to the App Store

Exporting the app for distribution

Save for Mac App Store Deployment

Testing the Installer package

Export a Developer ID-signed Application

Export a Development-signed Application

Export as a macOS App

Summary

And finally

The book website

Preface

This book will take your Swift programming skills to a level at which you can work as a professional software engineer, using a step-by-step approach, ensuring that the introduction of each new concept is preceded by a thorough understanding of those preceding it.

The book covers a range of technologies, particularly those that you'll typically need, if not on day one of a new project (or a new job), then at least pretty soon after. These include not just Apple's Xcode, but also the Terminal app, Git version control, package management, the Swift REPL, and the LLDB debugger, all of which are essential skills.

Each chapter focuses on a particular topic or technology, giving you a deep dive into the skills and know-how that will take your work to a professional standard, in terms of code quality, maintainability, and robustness. This entails general topics, such as programming paradigms and design patterns, a general look at the Cocoa frameworks and their place in the macOS ecosystem, and of course specific technologies around networking, storage, and advanced graphics and animation.

Furthermore, a significant portion of the text is devoted to such thorny issues as concurrency, asynchronous programming, and error handling.

By the end of this book, you will be able to confidently approach projects of much greater size and complexity, and be well placed to comfortably deal with the various issues that all programming inevitably brings with it.

Coding is a never-ending journey. This book aims to get you on the right track, and a fair way along it.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Hello macOS, explores the context in which the rest of the book is set and takes a look at developing for Apple platforms in general, and the direction that development is heading in.

Chapter 2, Basic Swift, takes a broad, high-level view of the Swift programming language.

Chapter 3, Checking out the Power of Xcode, introduces some pro-orientated aspects of this powerful, integrated Development Environment created by Apple.

Chapter 4, MVC and Other Design Patterns, covers a number of ways to help you plan your projects, from high-level conceptual down to the benefits offered by different styles of programming at the code level.

Chapter 5, Advanced Swift, investigates some of Swift's more powerful language features and idioms.

Chapter 6, Cocoa Frameworks - The Backbone of Your Apps, covers the large palette of ready-written framework code that relieve many of the burdens of low-level coding and boilerplate.

Chapter 7, Creating Views Programmatically, is concerned with giving you total control of your user interface, by moving beyond the constraints of visual UI editing.

Chapter 8, Strings and Text, looks at how to master the all-important textual features that are part of nearly every app you'll write for macOS.

Chapter 9, Getting More from Interface Builder, gets you through the maze of functionality offered by Apple's user interface creation tool.

Chapter 10, Drawing on the Strength of Core Graphics, drops us down to some low-level drawing routines, when the preconfigured UI offerings just aren't enough.

Chapter 11, Core Animation, takes you to the heart of what makes macOS such a polished and visually engaging platform.

Chapter 12, Handling Errors Gracefully, deals with the various tools you have at your disposal to handle all eventualities in your app, to produce a smooth and frustration-free user experience.

Chapter 13, Persistent Storage, introduces some of the most commonly used scenarios for storing data on disk.

Chapter 14, The Benefits of Core Data, takes you deeper into structured data persistence, keeping that critical user data organized and quickly accessible.

Chapter 15, Connect to the World - Networking, looks at connecting your code to the Internet, using the web session frameworks that Cocoa provides.

Chapter 16, Concurrency and Asynchronous Programming, aims to set some best practices, as well as investigate the appropriate tools, for dealing with time-sensitive data flows.

Chapter 17, Understanding Xcode's Debugging Tools, helps you master some of the most important tools at our disposal--Xcode's debugging features--for those moments when it doesn't go quite like your plan.

Chapter 18, LLDB and the Command Line, takes you into, and demystifies, working in the terminal, where all the really good stuff lives.

Chapter 19, Deploying Third - Party Code, helps you understand the role of third-party frameworks and libraries, and how to productively integrate them into your codebase.

Chapter 20, Wrapping It Up, gets your code from your hard drive to the App Store, avoiding the most common pitfalls along the way.

What you need for this book

To create and build the code presented here, you will need nothing more than Apple’s Xcode software package, which you can download for free in the App Store, and a Mac to run it on. A number of other tools are introduced, such as the OS X Terminal app, which are already installed on your Mac.

Testing the code can be done on any installation of macOS.

Who this book is for

If you have intermediate knowledge of programming in Swift and are looking for the best way to take your development skills to a professional level, this book is just the right one for you.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: But what if we want to make changes to, say, the app's Build Settings, or even its Info.plist file? Can we do that too?

A block of code is set as follows:

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: Click Options, and ensure that Copy Items if Needed is ticked. 

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book-what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply e-mail feedback@packtpub.com, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

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Downloading the color images of this book

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Errata

Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books-maybe a mistake in the text or the code-we would be grateful if you could report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded to our website or added to any list of existing errata under the Errata section of that title.

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Questions

If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at questions@packtpub.com, and we will do our best to address the problem.

Hello macOS

Goodbye and thank you OS X, hello and welcome macOS!

Sierra is here, also known as macOS 10.12. Apple's latest OS release, announced at the 2016 World Wide Developers Conference, offers the modern app developer more tools than ever with which to create engaging, productive, and entertaining apps for what an ever-increasing number of people deem the world's most advanced operating system.

Now that it's here, it seems it was a long time coming. Apple has renamed its desktop operating system to reflect its integral part in the Apple ecosystem, which comprises iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and finally macOS. This makes a lot of sense, since so much of what we know both as users and as developers from one platform is reflected in the others, sometimes very closely, sometimes adapted to differences in the hardware with which these platforms are used.

The cross-fertilization of Apple's platforms is rapidly increasing, giving new impetus to the desktop operating system that has in many ways taken a back seat to the mobile juggernaut that the iPhone and iPad represent. The massive adoption of mobile technologies has provided a spurt of innovation that Apple has begun to integrate seriously into what has become macOS. At the same time, decades of experience with macOS, then OS X, and now macOS have flowed into the mobile space as the processors in phones and other devices grow more powerful.

But although the name has changed, the OS is in every sense the next version of OS X, as the 10.12 version number makes clear. Visually, nothing has changed either; About This Mac still shows the same small info window--only the mountain has changed:

This is really a great time to be an app developer. It is no exaggeration to describe what is happening across the globe as the digital revolution, and whether we're interested in productivity, entertainment, dissemination of information, or any one of scores of other development genres, we find ourselves on extremely fertile ground. It seems there are as many opportunities out there as there are souls ready to take on the challenges of creating the software that continues to drive progress at a breathtaking pace.

When approaching macOS as a developer, you will be able to make use of any and all experience you may have with programming for OS X, and if your background is in iOS and/or one of the other platforms, you will also discover the great extent to which you can leverage the knowledge and skills you have developed on those platforms. Indeed, much of the code you write for one platform will be directly usable in another, with little or no adaptation necessary.

If you are coming from a non-Apple background, I think it is safe to say you will find developing in Swift for macOS a rewarding expansion of your skills. Swift is a rich, flexible and expressive language, but not one that is hard to learn. It has, to some extent, a syntactic similarity to many modern object-oriented programming languages such as Python and Java (okay, modern in comparison to earlier popular successes such as Lisp and Fortran).

In this first chapter, we will look at the following topics:

The Swift programming language

Xcode and other development tools

How this book is structured

Some prerequisites for getting the most from this book

What this book will do for you once you have read it

So, let's look at where this book is going to take you, and how it will get you there.

It's going to be Swift

In just a little over two years, Swift has become one of the software development world's most talked-about programming languages, and is even the most forked repository on GitHub (but then, how many new languages have the power of a multinational like Apple behind them?). The language has undergone (and is still undergoing) incredibly rapid evolution, guided principally by Chris Lattner and the team at Apple, but also by the wider community, since it was open-sourced in December 2015, with proposals for language changes by non-Apple developers being included in the release of version 3.0. This radical departure from Apple's usually secretive product development strategy has meant that Swift has already benefitted from the experience and perspective of a great number of developers of mixed backgrounds (in every sense), with Apple itself saying that release 3.0 contains work by a total of three hundred and sixty-odd contributors.

If you are coming to Swift from Objective C for the first time, you will find it a much more succinct and clear language, one that needs fewer lines of boilerplate code, not to mention fewer semicolons, than its predecessor. If your background is in Python, JavaScript, or Java (to name the obvious ones), you'll find the code much easier to understand at first glance than would have been the case with Objective C--this is a good time to add Apple's platforms to your portfolio.

The code in this book will be in Swift version 3. Readers familiar with Swift 2.2 or earlier will notice that much has changed in the new version. We will not go into the details of those changes explicitly here, although they will be apparent from the next chapter onwards.

And more than Swift

But whether you refer to yourself as a software engineer, app developer, or hacker, there is substantially more to the job than writing Swift code inside Xcode. We will also be looking at interacting with bash shells in Terminal, dealing with files in XML format, data returned from the Web in JSON format, a little HTML, and the odd sprinkling of other languages, which may be used outside Xcode to good advantage.

We won't be going into a great amount of depth in these peripheral topics (if they can even be considered peripheral), but we will present what is essentially needed to get the job done, and give the reader an idea of the role they play in the larger picture. The interested reader will find no shortage of books and web resources with which to expand on the information presented here. There are also a number of articles available on the website that accompanies this book: http://grimshaw.de/macOS-book.

It's going to be Xcode and more

Much of this book, particularly the later chapters, will look at leveraging the considerable power of the Xcode-integrated development environment, in order to familiarize the reader with many aspects of development that go beyond code writing, to include debugging, performance measurement and improvement, working with source control within a team, and many others.

Software development is rarely a matter of using one single program, and we will be utilizing several tools other than Xcode to get the most out of the time we spend coding, compiling, and testing our work. You might be pleased to learn that none of these tools are going to cost you any money (although like any other tool, they come at the cost of a certain amount of time to be invested in order to reach a moderate level of proficiency). You might be even more pleased to learn that we will be covering this ground step by step, and no previous knowledge is assumed.

Prerequisites

Despite the varied backgrounds that readers of this book are likely to have, we will make some broad assumptions about the level of skill and experience you bring with you. There are also some hardware requirements, though nothing you're unlikely to have already.

To be able to comfortably follow this book, you will need to have the following:

A reasonably high level of familiarity with the macOS/OS X operating system and its day-to-day use, including trackpad gestures (in addition to mouse clicks, obviously), the file system as accessed through the Finder, and the general features of both Apple and third-party software.

Some basic experience of programming using an object-oriented programming language such as Swift, Objective C, or Java.

An Apple computer running at least macOS Sierra, with Xcode