iPhone and iPad App 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 3

A Tour of Xcode

Xcode is Apple’s IDE (Integrated Development Environment), which you use to create iOS applications. The word “integrated” refers to the fact that Xcode brings together several different tools into a single application.

Xcode contains several tools, but the ones you’ll use most of the time are the source code editor, debugger, and Interface Builder. The current version of Xcode when this book is being written is 4.2.

In this lesson you explore various commonly used features of Xcode.

The Welcome Screen

When you launch Xcode, you are presented with the welcome dialog (Figure 3-1). You can use the welcome dialog to quickly create a new project, connect to a source code repository, open a recently used project, and access documentation.

The first step toward creating an iOS application is the creation of an appropriate project in Xcode. An Xcode project has the file extension .xcodeproj, and tells the Xcode IDE (among other things) the name of your application, what kind of application it is (iPhone/iPad/Universal), and where to find the code files and resources required to create the application.

Selecting a Project Template

When you create a new project in Xcode, you first need to select a template on which to base the project. Xcode templates contain files that you need to start developing a new application. Xcode provides a list of project templates to select from (Figure 3-2).

The Xcode template window has two categories of templates to choose from. ...