Xcode Guide
A guide on setting up Xcode with all the essential Applications, Tools, and Frameworks to make your development experience with Xcode great!
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Table of Contents
Getting Started
Apple Developer Documentation for Xcode
Xcode includes everything developers need to create great applications for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. Xcode provides developers a unified workflow for user interface design, coding, testing, and debugging. Xcode 12 is built as an Universal app that runs 100% natively on Intel-based CPUs and Apple Silicon. It includes a unified macOS SDK that features all the frameworks, compilers, debuggers, and other tools you need to build apps that run natively on Apple Silicon and the Intel x86_64 CPU.
Developing with SwiftUI in Xcode 12
Xcode Cloud is a continuous integration and delivery service built into Xcode and designed expressly for Apple developers. It accelerates the development and delivery of high-quality apps by bringing together cloud-based tools that help you build apps, run automated tests in parallel, deliver apps to testers, and view and manage user feedback.
Xcode Cloud. Source: Apple
SwiftUI is a user interface toolkit that provides views, controls, and layout structures for declaring your app's user interface. The SwiftUI framework provides event handlers for delivering taps, gestures, and other types of input to your application.
UIKit is a framework provides the required infrastructure for your iOS or tvOS apps. It provides the window and view architecture for implementing your interface, the event handling infrastructure for delivering Multi-Touch and other types of input to your app, and the main run loop needed to manage interactions among the user, the system, and your app.
AppKit is a graphical user interface toolkit that contains all the objects you need to implement the user interface for a macOS app such as windows, panels, buttons, menus, scrollers, and text fields, and it handles all the details for you as it efficiently draws on the screen, communicates with hardware devices and screen buffers, clears areas of the screen before drawing, and clips views.
ARKit is a set set of software development tools to enable developers to build augmented-reality apps for iOS developed by Apple. The latest version ARKit 3.5 takes advantage of the new LiDAR Scanner and depth sensing system on iPad Pro(2020) to support a new generation of AR apps that use Scene Geometry for enhanced scene understanding and object occlusion.
RealityKit is a framework to implement high-performance 3D simulation and rendering with information provided by the ARKit framework to seamlessly integrate virtual objects into the real world.
SceneKit is a high-level 3D graphics framework that helps you create 3D animated scenes and effects in your iOS apps.
Mac Catalyst is a set of Apple APIs that developers can use to rapidly port their iOS apps to Apple Silicon M1 Chip and take full advantage of the new capabilities on the new Apple hardware.
Instruments is a powerful and flexible performance-analysis and testing tool that’s part of the Xcode tool set. It’s designed to help you profile your iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS apps, processes, and devices in order to better understand and optimize their behavior and performance.
TestFlight is a tool that makes it easy to invite users to test your apps and App Clips and collect valuable feedback before releasing your apps on the App Store. It allows you to invite up to 10,000 testers using just their email address or by sharing a public link.
Xcode Developer Platforms for Apps
macOS is an advanced desktop operating system (OS) for Apple's series of desktops and laptops.
macOS Monterey. Source: Apple
iOS is an advanced mobile operating system (OS) for Apple's series of iPhone products.
iOS 15. Source: Apple
iPadOS is an advanced mobile operating system (OS) for Apple's series of iPad products.
iPadOS 15. Source: Apple
WatchOS is an advanced mobile operating system (OS) for Apple's series of Watch products.
WatchOS 8. Source: Apple
tvOS is an advanced mobile operating system (OS) for Apple's series of TV products.
tvOS 15. Source: Apple
Swift Development
Swift Learning Resources
Swift is Apple's main programming language for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS app development. Though, many parts of Swift will be familiar to developers from their experience of developing in C and Objective-C.
Swift Evolution maintains proposals for changes and user-visible enhancements to the Swift Programming Language.
Xcode + Swift makes developing applications for MacOS and iOS fast and fun.
Start Developing iOS Apps with Swift
Apple Core Animation Framework
Paravirtualized Graphics Framework
Mac Catalyst - iOS - Human Interface Guidelines
Swift Courses Online from Coursera
Swift Courses Online from Udemy
Learning Swift course from Codecademy
Swift Tools, Libraries, and Frameworks
Xcode includes everything developers need to create great applications for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. Xcode provides developers a unified workflow for user interface design, coding, testing, and debugging. Xcode 12 is built as an Universal app that runs 100% natively on Intel-based CPUs and Apple Silicon. It includes a unified macOS SDK that features all the frameworks, compilers, debuggers, and other tools you need to build apps that run natively on Apple Silicon and the Intel x86_64 CPU.
SwiftUI is a user interface toolkit that provides views, controls, and layout structures for declaring your app's user interface. The SwiftUI framework provides event handlers for delivering taps, gestures, and other types of input to your application.
UIKit is a framework provides the required infrastructure for your iOS or tvOS apps. It provides the window and view architecture for implementing your interface, the event handling infrastructure for delivering Multi-Touch and other types of input to your app, and the main run loop needed to manage interactions among the user, the system, and your app.
AppKit is a graphical user interface toolkit that contains all the objects you need to implement the user interface for a macOS app such as windows, panels, buttons, menus, scrollers, and text fields, and it handles all the details for you as it efficiently draws on the screen, communicates with hardware devices and screen buffers, clears areas of the screen before drawing, and clips views.
ARKit is a set set of software development tools to enable developers to build augmented-reality apps for iOS developed by Apple. The latest version ARKit 3.5 takes advantage of the new LiDAR Scanner and depth sensing system on iPad Pro(2020) to support a new generation of AR apps that use Scene Geometry for enhanced scene understanding and object occlusion.
RealityKit is a framework to implement high-performance 3D simulation and rendering with information provided by the ARKit framework to seamlessly integrate virtual objects into the real world.
SceneKit is a high-level 3D graphics framework that helps you create 3D animated scenes and effects in your iOS apps.
Mac Catalyst is a set of Apple APIs that developers can use to rapidly port their iOS apps to Apple Silicon M1 Chip and take full advantage of the new capabilities on the new Apple hardware.
Instruments is a powerful and flexible performance-analysis and testing tool that’s part of the Xcode tool set. It’s designed to help you profile your iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS apps, processes, and devices in order to better understand and optimize their behavior and performance.
Cocoapods is a dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C used in Xcode projects by specifying the dependencies for your project in a simple text file. CocoaPods then recursively resolves dependencies between libraries, fetches source code for all dependencies, and creates and maintains an Xcode workspace to build your project.
AppCode is constantly monitoring the quality of your code. It warns you of errors and smells and suggests quick-fixes to resolve them automatically. AppCode provides lots of code inspections for Objective-C, Swift, C/C++, and a number of code inspections for other supported languages.
Vapor is a web framework for Swift. It provides a beautifully expressive and easy to use foundation for your next website, API, or cloud project.
Hero is a library for building iOS view controller transitions. It provides a declarative layer on top of the UIKit's cumbersome transition APIs—making custom transitions an easy task for developers.
Kingfisher is a powerful, pure-Swift library for downloading and caching images from the web. It provides you a chance to use a pure-Swift way to work with remote images in your next app.
Realm is a mobile database that runs directly inside phones, tablets or wearables. This repository holds the source code for the iOS, macOS, tvOS & watchOS versions of Realm Swift & Realm Objective-C.
Perfect is a complete and powerful toolbox, framework, and application server for Linux, iOS, and macOS (OS X). It provides everything a Swift engineer needs for developing lightweight, maintainable, and scalable apps and other REST services entirely in the Swift programming language for both client-facing and server-side applications.
Alamofire is an HTTP networking library written in Swift.
Eureka is an elegant iOS form builder in Swift
Carthage is intended to be the simplest way to add frameworks to your Cocoa application. Carthage builds your dependencies and provides you with binary frameworks, but you retain full control over your project structure and setup. Carthage does not automatically modify your project files or your build settings.
ReactiveCocoa is reactive extensions to Cocoa frameworks, built on top of ReactiveSwift.
Objective-C Development
Objective-C Learning Resources
Objective-C was the primary programming language used for writing software for macOS and iOS until Swift was introduced in 2014. It is a superset of the C programming language and provides object-oriented capabilities and a dynamic runtime.
Google's Objective-C Style Guide
Objective C Courses on Coursera
Objective-C online course on Udemy
Objective-C for Swift Developers course by David Nutter
Objective-C Essential Training on LinkedIn Learning
Objective-C for Swift Developers on Udacity
Objective-C Tools, Libraries, and Frameworks
Xcode includes everything developers need to create great applications for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. Xcode provides developers a unified workflow for user interface design, coding, testing, and debugging.
AppKit is a graphical user interface toolkit that contains all the objects you need to implement the user interface for a macOS app such as windows, panels, buttons, menus, scrollers, and text fields, and it handles all the details for you as it efficiently draws on the screen, communicates with hardware devices and screen buffers, clears areas of the screen before drawing, and clips views.
Instruments is a powerful and flexible performance-analysis and testing tool that’s part of the Xcode tool set. It’s designed to help you profile your iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS apps, processes, and devices in order to better understand and optimize their behavior and performance.
Cocoapods is a dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C in your Xcode projects by specifying the dependencies for your project in a simple text file. CocoaPods then recursively resolves dependencies between libraries, fetches source code for all dependencies, and creates and maintains an Xcode workspace to build your project.
AppCode is constantly monitoring the quality of your code. It warns you of errors and smells and suggests quick-fixes to resolve them automatically. AppCode provides lots of code inspections for Objective-C, Swift, C/C++, and a number of code inspections for other supported languages.
Realm is a mobile database(replaces Core Data & SQLite) that runs directly inside phones, tablets or wearables.
Infer is a static analysis tool for Java, C++, Objective-C, and C.
Mantle is a model framework that makes it easy to write a simple model layer for your Cocoa or Cocoa Touch application.
Quick is a behavior-driven development framework for Swift and Objective-C.
Aspects is a simple library for aspect oriented programming in Objective-C and Swift.
Hammerspoon is a tool for powerful automation for macOS that acts as a bridge between the operating system and a Lua scripting engine.
Nimbus is an iOS framework whose feature set grows only as fast as its documentation.
Core ML Development
Core ML Learning Resources
Core ML is an Apple framework for integrating machine learning models into apps running on Apple devices (including iOS, watchOS, macOS, and tvOS). Core ML introduces a public file format (.mlmodel) for a broad set of ML methods including deep neural networks (both convolutional and recurrent), tree ensembles with boosting, and generalized linear models. Models in this format can be directly integrated into apps through Xcode.
Integrating a Core ML Model into your App
Apple Developer Forums for Core ML
Top Core ML Courses Online | Udemy
Top Core ML Courses Online | Coursera
IBM Watson Services for Core ML | IBM
Generate Core ML assets using IBM Maximo Visual Inspection | IBM
Core ML Tools, Libraries, and Frameworks
Core ML tools is a project that contains supporting tools for Core ML model conversion, editing, and validation.
Create ML is a tool that provides new ways of training machine learning models on your Mac. It takes the complexity out of model training while producing powerful Core ML models.
Tensorflow_macOS is a Mac-optimized version of TensorFlow and TensorFlow Addons for macOS 11.0+ accelerated using Apple's ML Compute framework.
TensorFlow is an end-to-end open source platform for machine learning. It has a comprehensive, flexible ecosystem of tools, libraries and community resources that lets researchers push the state-of-the-art in ML and developers easily build and deploy ML powered applications.
Keras is a high-level neural networks API, written in Python and capable of running on top of TensorFlow, CNTK, or Theano.It was developed with a focus on enabling fast experimentation. It is capable of running on top of TensorFlow, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, R, Theano, or PlaidML.
PyTorch is a library for deep learning on irregular input data such as graphs, point clouds, and manifolds. Primarily developed by Facebook's AI Research lab.
XGBoost is an optimized distributed gradient boosting library designed to be highly efficient, flexible and portable. It implements machine learning algorithms under the Gradient Boosting framework. XGBoost provides a parallel tree boosting (also known as GBDT, GBM) that solve many data science problems in a fast and accurate way. It supports distributed training on multiple machines, including AWS, GCE, Azure, and Yarn clusters. Also, it can be integrated with Flink, Spark and other cloud dataflow systems.
LIBSVM is an integrated software for support vector classification, (C-SVC, nu-SVC), regression (epsilon-SVR, nu-SVR) and distribution estimation (one-class SVM). It supports multi-class classification.
Scikit-Learn is a simple and efficient tool for data mining and data analysis. It is built on NumPy,SciPy, and mathplotlib.
Apple Vision is a framework that performs face and face landmark detection, text detection, barcode recognition, image registration, and general feature tracking. Vision also allows the use of custom Core ML models for tasks like classification or object detection.
Xcode includes everything developers need to create great applications for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. Xcode provides developers a unified workflow for user interface design, coding, testing, and debugging. Xcode 12 is built as an Universal app that runs 100% natively on Intel-based CPUs and Apple Silicon. It includes a unified macOS SDK that features all the frameworks, compilers, debuggers, and other tools you need to build apps that run natively on Apple Silicon and the Intel x86_64 CPU.
SwiftUI is a user interface toolkit that provides views, controls, and layout structures for declaring your app's user interface. The SwiftUI framework provides event handlers for delivering taps, gestures, and other types of input to your application.
UIKit is a framework provides the required infrastructure for your iOS or tvOS apps. It provides the window and view architecture for implementing your interface, the event handling infrastructure for delivering Multi-Touch and other types of input to your app, and the main run loop needed to manage interactions among the user, the system, and your app.
AppKit is a graphical user interface toolkit that contains all the objects you need to implement the user interface for a macOS app such as windows, panels, buttons, menus, scrollers, and text fields, and it handles all the details for you as it efficiently draws on the screen, communicates with hardware devices and screen buffers, clears areas of the screen before drawing, and clips views.
ARKit is a set set of software development tools to enable developers to build augmented-reality apps for iOS developed by Apple. The latest version ARKit 3.5 takes advantage of the new LiDAR Scanner and depth sensing system on iPad Pro(2020) to support a new generation of AR apps that use Scene Geometry for enhanced scene understanding and object occlusion.
RealityKit is a framework to implement high-performance 3D simulation and rendering with information provided by the ARKit framework to seamlessly integrate virtual objects into the real world.
SceneKit is a high-level 3D graphics framework that helps you create 3D animated scenes and effects in your iOS apps.
Instruments is a powerful and flexible performance-analysis and testing tool that’s part of the Xcode tool set. It’s designed to help you profile your iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS apps, processes, and devices in order to better understand and optimize their behavior and performance.
Cocoapods is a dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C used in Xcode projects by specifying the dependencies for your project in a simple text file. CocoaPods then recursively resolves dependencies between libraries, fetches source code for all dependencies, and creates and maintains an Xcode workspace to build your project.
AppCode is constantly monitoring the quality of your code. It warns you of errors and smells and suggests quick-fixes to resolve them automatically. AppCode provides lots of code inspections for Objective-C, Swift, C/C++, and a number of code inspections for other supported languages.
Metal Development
Metal Learning Resources
Metal is a low-level API that provides a platform-optimized, low-overhead API for developing the latest 3D pro applications and amazing games using a rich shading language with tighter integration between graphics and compute programs. To help you do more while managing ever more complex shader code, Metal adds an unparalleled suite of advanced GPU debugging tools to help you realize the full potential of your graphics code.
Metal Shading Language Specification
Using Metal Feature Set Tables
Optimizing Performance with the GPU Counters Instrument
Reducing the Memory Footprint of Metal Apps
Metal Developer Tools for Windows
Metal Tools, Libraries, and Frameworks
Apple Foundation Framework is a framework provides a base layer of functionality for apps and frameworks, including data storage and persistence, text processing, date and time calculations, sorting and filtering, and networking. The classes, protocols, and data types defined by Foundation are used throughout the macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS SDKs.
Apple Core Animation Framework is a graphics rendering and animation infrastructure that provides high frame rates and smooth animations without burdening the CPU and slowing down your app.
Apple Core Graphics Frameworkis a framework based on the Quartz advanced drawing engine. It provides low-level, lightweight 2D rendering with unmatched output fidelity.
Paravirtualized Graphics Framework is a framework that implements hardware-accelerated graphics for macOS running in a virtual machine, hereafter known as the guest. The macOS operating system provides a graphics driver that runs inside the guest, communicating with the framework in the host operating system to take advantage of Metal-accelerated graphics.
Xcode includes everything developers need to create great applications for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. Xcode provides developers a unified workflow for user interface design, coding, testing, and debugging. Xcode 12 is built as an Universal app that runs 100% natively on Intel-based CPUs and Apple Silicon. It includes a unified macOS SDK that features all the frameworks, compilers, debuggers, and other tools you need to build apps that run natively on Apple Silicon and the Intel x86_64 CPU.
SwiftUI is a user interface toolkit that provides views, controls, and layout structures for declaring your app's user interface. The SwiftUI framework provides event handlers for delivering taps, gestures, and other types of input to your application.
UIKit is a framework provides the required infrastructure for your iOS or tvOS apps. It provides the window and view architecture for implementing your interface, the event handling infrastructure for delivering Multi-Touch and other types of input to your app, and the main run loop needed to manage interactions among the user, the system, and your app.
AppKit is a graphical user interface toolkit that contains all the objects you need to implement the user interface for a macOS app such as windows, panels, buttons, menus, scrollers, and text fields, and it handles all the details for you as it efficiently draws on the screen, communicates with hardware devices and screen buffers, clears areas of the screen before drawing, and clips views.
ARKit is a set set of software development tools to enable developers to build augmented-reality apps for iOS developed by Apple. The latest version ARKit 3.5 takes advantage of the new LiDAR Scanner and depth sensing system on iPad Pro(2020) to support a new generation of AR apps that use Scene Geometry for enhanced scene understanding and object occlusion.
RealityKit is a framework to implement high-performance 3D simulation and rendering with information provided by the ARKit framework to seamlessly integrate virtual objects into the real world.
SceneKit is a high-level 3D graphics framework that helps you create 3D animated scenes and effects in your iOS apps.
Instruments is a powerful and flexible performance-analysis and testing tool that’s part of the Xcode tool set. It’s designed to help you profile your iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS apps, processes, and devices in order to better understand and optimize their behavior and performance.
Cocoapods is a dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C used in Xcode projects by specifying the dependencies for your project in a simple text file. CocoaPods then recursively resolves dependencies between libraries, fetches source code for all dependencies, and creates and maintains an Xcode workspace to build your project.
AppCode is constantly monitoring the quality of your code. It warns you of errors and smells and suggests quick-fixes to resolve them automatically. AppCode provides lots of code inspections for Objective-C, Swift, C/C++, and a number of code inspections for other supported languages.
MoltenVK is an implementation of Vulkan running on iOS and macOS using Apple's Metal graphics framework.
Apple Silicon
Apple M1/M1 Pro/M1 Max Architectures.
Does it ARM? Apps that are reported to support Apple Silicon
Apple Hypervisor is a frameowrk that builds virtualization solutions on top of a lightweight hypervisor, without third-party kernel extensions. Hypervisor provides C APIs so you can interact with virtualization technologies in user space, without writing kernel extensions (KEXTs). As a result, the apps you create using this framework are suitable for distribution on the Mac App Store.
Apple A-series is Apple's 64-bit ARM-based system on a chip (SoC) used in their iPhones and iPads. Though, at WWDC 2020 it was announced that Apple Silicon would transition into Mac laptops.
Apple M1 Chip is Apple's first SoC chip designed specifically for their ARM Mac products, it delivers incredible performance(8-core CPU and 8-core GPU), custom technologies, and great power efficiency. The M1 Chip is now availble for Macbook Pro 13 with M1, Macbook Air 13 with M1, and Mac Mini with M1.
M1 Chip. Source: Apple
Apple M1 Pro Chip is a 8 or 10-core system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture designed for pro systems in the MacBook Pro 14”. The chip features fast unified memory, industry-leading performance per watt, and incredible power efficiency, along with increased memory bandwidth and capacity. The M1 Pro offers up to 200GB/s of memory bandwidth with support for up to 32GB of unified memory and a GPU (14-core or 16-core option).
M1 Pro Chip. Source: Apple
Apple M1 Max Chip is a 10-core system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture designed for pro systems in the MacBook Pro 16”. The chip features fast unified memory, industry-leading performance per watt, and incredible power efficiency, along with increased memory bandwidth and capacity. The M1 Pro offers up to 400GB/s of memory bandwidth with support for up to 64GB of unified memory and a GPU (16-core or 32-core option).
M1 Max Chip. Source: Apple
Tensorflow_macOS is a Mac-optimized version of TensorFlow and TensorFlow Addons for macOS 11.0+ accelerated using Apple's ML Compute framework.
Universal App Quick Start Program
Writing ARM64 Code for Apple Platforms
Porting Your macOS Apps to Apple Silicon
Building a Universal macOS Binary
Addressing Architectural Differences in Your macOS Code
Porting Just-In-Time(JIT) Compilers to Apple Silicon
Porting Your Audio Code to Apple Silicon
Porting Your Metal Code to Apple Silicon
Tuning Your Code’s Performance for Apple Silicon
Learn how Rosetta translates executables and what Rosetta can’t translate
Running Your iOS Apps on macOS
Adapting iOS Code to Run in the macOS Environment
Implementing Drivers, System Extensions, and Kexts
Installing a Custom Kernel Extension
Debugging a Custom Kernel Extension
Contribute
- If would you like to contribute to this guide simply make a Pull Request.
License
Distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Public License.
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