Introduction to XCode

This post was written few years ago. Swift wasn't born yet. So, everything in here is Objective-C, but I have updated the images to use the latest Xcode IDE as of date.

Assumptions:

1. You know how to code and just wanted to know more about iOS applications development.

Objectives:

1. To know the IDE that we will be using

2. To be able to make simple applications

3. To build and run our programs on our console.

You may download Xcode from http://developer.apple.com/ and go to iOS Dev Center.

Xcode is an Integrated Development Environment that lets you write down your code, compile, debug and execute your program.

I’ll assume that you have finished installing Xcode on your computer.

Open Xcode and choose "Create a new Xcode project"

Choose Command Line Tool under macOS tab.Since this is going to be our first time, let us be familiar with running our programs in Command Line Tool first.

Add a name to your project

Organization Identifier can just be anything as long as it starts with "com."

In the latest Xcode, of course, Swift is already available, but for the sake of this old post, let's choose "Objective-C" as our language.

Tadaaa! Here’s your project!

The whole left panel is the ”Navigator Pane.” The left most icon inside the red box is the ”Project Navigator.” It lets us navigate to the different folders and files that were created automatically by the IDE when we create our project, and the files that we manually created as well. We will discuss the use of other icons on the Navigator Pane once we have the need to use them.

If you hit the Build & Run button, it will open the Debugging Area which is divided into the Variables and the Console Log. If you have declared any variables, and made a breakpoint, it will show up in the Variables pane with its values. Anything you print (NSLog) will show up in the Console Log Pane. In our code above, we printed "Hello, world!," and as you can see in our console, it printed "Hello, world!"

This is the Utilities Area. The upper part of the Utilities Area has the ”File Inspector” which gives you information about the selected file from the ”Project Navigator” (in our case, the main.m file). The utilities area is very useful when we start creating UI for our iOS Applications.

Build and Run Keyboard shortcuts

To build: 

Command + B //this will compile your code

To run:  Command + R //this will run your code As we can see from our main.m file:

NSLog(@"Hello, World!");

Let's Build & Run our application:

And as you saw earlier, "Hello, World!" will be printed in our console.