I got hooked onto trying to make computers do what I told them a very long time ago and have never stopped loving it. I’m a keen evangelist for developing native Mac apps. When not at my computer, I love coffee, puzzles, reading and cooking — the day hasn’t started until the first cup of coffee is drunk and the crossword is done! — Sarah

I’m a fan of words and the things you can do with them, and I’ve spent a decade floating between different forms of writing — academic, fiction, technical. I hope that in this book I’ve succeeded at easing the passage of ideas between Sarah’s brain and your own, and I ask only that you blame me for any typos, stray capitals, Australianisms, and unoxfordenised commas that have made it into the final manuscript. — Peter

To Jack who persists in trying to teach his mother some computer science and to Jerry who was here at the start of this book but couldn’t make it to the end.

To follow along with this book, you’ll need the following:

The source code for this book can be downloaded from the GitHub repository:

Click the link to open it in your browser. You’ll see a big green Code button. Click on that and on Download ZIP. This puts all the code files in your Downloads folder. Please download instead of cloning as this gives you a clean set of files, without my source control.

Depending on your browser settings, you may need to double-click the ZIP file to expand it. That gives you a folder containing one sub-folder for each chapter. The text of each chapter tells you when you need to use any of these files or folders, but every chapter that involves coding has a final folder showing the end result of working through that chapter.

Each section is designed to cover a particular aspect of development but they can each be read independently.

When you get to the code blocks, if the code is unfamiliar to you, then I strongly recommend that you type it in for yourself, rather than copy and paste it. Xcode’s auto-suggestions will help you, and having to get every detail correct will embed the new knowledge in your brain in a way that reading it can’t.

If you are using copy and paste for any of the code blocks, then go to Xcode’s Settings and in Text Editing → Indentation, turn on Re-Indent on paste. This will solve a lot of issues with the format of the text in the book differing from Xcode’s format.

This book is available as HTML, PDF or ePub. I recommend reading this book from the HTML version. It has good light and dark variations and the most accurate formatting. Also, the code blocks have a COPY button for when you want it, and there are no issues with pagination. My next favorite is PDF — use the light or dark version to suit your preference. If you’re reading either PDF, I suggest you use Preview or Firefox. Do not use Adobe Reader or Acrobat as they are unable to fully read the embedded fonts so will miss out some characters. My least favorite reading option is the ePub, as its display depends greatly on your ePub reader.

If you find any errors or typos, please report them to me at [email protected]. For problems with the code, please open an issue at https://github.com/trozware/escape_book_code/issues.

I assume you have Xcode installed already, but if not, download it from the Mac App Store. When it runs for the first time, you only need the macOS components which are installed by default. Get the Predictive Code Completion Model too, if it’s offered to you.

Launch Xcode and create a new project using the macOS App template. Set the options for your project like this:

For the rest of this dialog, set the following:

Click Next and you get to decide where to save your project.

I like to use a folder called Developer in my user folder. Finder gives it a neat hammer icon and it’s a logical place to store your development work.

If you don’t have a Developer folder, navigate to your user folder and click New Folder to create it. Unselect Create Git repository on my Mac and click Create to create and save your project files.

Xcode opens with the default view for a new project:

As Xcode prepares the preview, you may see a message like this:

This is because you haven’t assigned a team yet, so click Open Anyway whenever you see this. You’ll fix it in a minute.

The first thing to do now is to make this window as large as possible. Full screen mode makes the menus harder to see and access, so I prefer to maximize the window instead. Mouse over the green blob at the top left of the window, and when the window resizing popup appears, choose the first Fill option to expand the window as much as possible. If you have a very wide screen, you may prefer to shrink the width, but keep the height as large as you can.

Now that the main project window is large, you can make some more changes to increase your working space even more.

First, turn off the minimap. This is the view beside the code pane that shows a miniaturized version of your code for navigation purposes. It’s a neat implementation that shows more detail as you mouse over it, but in my opinion, if a file is long enough to make this valuable, then it’s too long and should be split into multiple files.

Go to Editor → Minimap and toggle this off.

The next thing to hide is the sidebar on the right. If you’re editing an AppKit or UIKit storyboard, then it’s important, but you don’t need it for anything else - its space is more valuable.

Click the Hide or Show the Inspectors toggle at the top right corner of the window, or press Option-Command-Zero to hide it.

Now you’ve got a large window with three vertical panes:

One final tweak before leaving this section. In the top toolbar, you may see a cloud icon with a blue dot. This is an Apple advertisement for Xcode Cloud. To get rid of it, click the cloud icon and then click Dismiss:

It keeps popping back, but this is how you can get rid of it, temporarily at least.

Now your project window looks like this:

Next to configure some settings…​

Go to Xcode → Settings…​ or press Command-, to open the Settings window. There are a lot of settings here, grouped into tabs. I’ll take you through each tab, telling you the ones I consider important.

As you saw in the settings, Xcode offers a lot of keyboard shortcuts. I don’t expect anyone to remember them all, but learning to use a selection of them will really speed up your workflow and increase your productivity.

Here are the ones I use all the time:

These are enough to get you thinking about shortcuts but here’s my technique for learning more:

This section is not essential, but it adds a nice level of personalization to your projects.

Look at the top of any of the .swift files in the project. When you create a file, Xcode adds a header that shows the file name, project name, your name and the creation date.

I don’t know about you, but to me, that’s a lot of wasted space for data that I can see at a glance in other places. The window title and the Project navigator both show the project name. The tab title shows the file name. I know who I am. So the only useful piece of data there is the creation date. I do find it interesting when opening an old project to see when I created various files.

Here’s how to change that header for every new file:

This is XML containing some standard header elements and then a dictionary. The only entry in the dictionary has the key FILEHEADER. Its value is set to a string which includes the ___DATE___ macro. Notice that it has a leading space — Xcode will add this to a comment line. Without the space, the text would start right after the comment marker:

If you’re interested in adding any more data to your file header, check out Apple’s Text macros reference page.

There are a lot of ways to configure Xcode. Some of them may seem largely cosmetic like themes or indentation levels, but anything that enhances the readability of your code will improve your productivity.

Other options provide more utility or quality-of-life improvements, and learning keyboard shortcuts is useful for any app that you use regularly.

As you work through this book, you’ll see that I stick to the settings I listed in this chapter, so you’ll find it more familiar looking if you use these too. After that, I encourage you to experiment with your own settings and find out what works best for you. There’s no wrong answer, so enjoy yourself trying out new themes, fonts and layout options.