iOS 12 Programming Fundamentals with Swift

Chapter 6. Anatomy of an Xcode Project

Xcode is the application used to develop an iOS app. An Xcode project is the source for an app; it’s the entire collection of files and settings used to construct the app. To create, develop, and maintain an app, it helps to know how to manipulate and navigate an Xcode project. You’ll want to know something about Xcode, and about the nature and structure of Xcode projects and how Xcode shows them to you. That’s the subject of this chapter.

Note

The term “Xcode” is used in two ways. It’s the name of the application in which you edit and build your app, and it’s the name of an entire suite of utilities that accompanies it; in the latter sense, Instruments and the Simulator are part of Xcode. This ambiguity should generally present little difficulty.

Xcode is a powerful, complex, and extremely large program. My approach in introducing Xcode is to suggest that you adopt a kind of deliberate tunnel vision: if you don’t understand something, don’t worry about it — don’t even look at it, and don’t touch it, because you might change something important. Our survey of Xcode will chart a safe, restricted, and essential path, focusing on aspects of Xcode that you most need to understand immediately, and resolutely ignoring everything else.

For full information, study Apple’s own documentation (choose Help → Xcode Help); it may seem overwhelming at first, but what you need to know is probably in there somewhere. There are also entire books devoted to ...