Programming iOS 6, 3rd Edition

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 needed to construct the app. To create, develop, and maintain an app, you must know how to manipulate and navigate an Xcode project. So you must know something about Xcode, and you must know something 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 actually used in two ways. It’s the name for the entire suite of developer tools — the Xcode tools — and it’s the name of one application within that suite, the application in which you edit and build your app. 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 describing ...