Chapter 4. Learning more about your development tools: Xcode
This chapter covers
- Introducing Xcode
- Getting to know the panels and the Standard Editor
- A guide to Xcode’s icons
Xcode can look pretty daunting when you first open it. As a beginning programmer, you don’t need to know about all the super powerful features, but you do need to get familiar with the basics.
You’ve already built a simple app using Xcode, and now we’ll go a little deeper into Xcode and its features. You’ll get to know the different panels and buttons and see how some of them work in this chapter. It isn’t terribly important that you remember the name of each panel and button, but if you do, it will definitely make working through this book easier. Apple updates Xcode frequently, so your panels may look slightly different than mine. Don’t worry if they don’t look exactly the same—some buttons may move around a bit, but the functions should be the same.
Xcode groups features and buttons into areas called panels so programmers can interact with them more easily. (If you’ve ever used Microsoft Word, you’re already familiar with panels. Microsoft Word uses panels to group features like font settings in a panel, and paragraph settings in another panel.)
This section walks you through the various Xcode panels. Remember to focus on picking up programming concepts rather than remembering the names of panels.