After reading this book, your main resource for learning more about iPhone OS development should be the references at http://developer.apple.com. To help you find documents that might interest you, this appendix lists the major classes in the UIKit and Foundation hierarchies that you may want to know more about, excluding classes that only appear as a part of another class.
The UIKit framework contains those classes most tightly connected to the devices, including all the graphical classes you use to make up pages. A partial listing appears as table A.1. It’s current as of iPhone OS 3.1.3 and will probably be mostly correct when you read this, but the UIKit does sometimes change between releases.
Foundation framework classes, whose names begin with NS, are almost as important as the UI classes because they represent foundational variable types, like strings and numbers. Table A.2 only lists the major classes that have some relevance to the sort of work you’ve done in this book; for more, look at Apple’s developer site under Core Services Frameworks.
Class |
Parent |
Summary |
---|---|---|
NSArray | NSObject | An array |
NSAutoreleasePool | NSObject | A memory-management class |
NSBundle | NSObject | A pointer toward a project’s filesystem home |
NSCharacterSet | NSObject | Methods for managing characters |
NSCountedSet | NSMutableSet | An unordered collection of elements |
NSData | NSObject | A wrapper for a byte buffer |
NSDictionary | NSObject | An associative array |
NSError | NSObject | Encapsulated error information |
NSFileHandler | NSObject | A methodology for controlling files |
NSFileManager | NSObject | A manager for filesystem work |
NSIndexPath | NSObject | A node path |
NSLog | NSObject | A very important object for debugging; logs a formatted string to the system log |
NSMutableArray | NSArray | An array that can be changed |
NSMutableCharacterSet | NSCharacterSet | A character set that can be changed |
NSMutableData | NSData | Data that can be changed |
NSMutableDictionary | NSDictionary | A dictionary that can be changed |
NSMutableSet | NSSet | A set that can be changed |
NSMutableString | NSString | A string that can be changed |
NSMutableURLRequest | NSURLRequest | A URL request that can be changed |
NSNotificationCenter | NSObject | A notification manager |
NSNumber | NSValue | A way to encapsulate many types of numbers |
NSObject | N/A | The root class for Cocoa Touch |
NSString | NSObject | A class for various sorts of string storage and manipulation |
NSURL | NSObject | A simple URL object |
NSURLRequest | NSObject | A URL plus a cache policy |
NSValue | NSObject | A simple container for data |
NSXMLParser | NSObject | An XML parser |
The UI and NS classes should contain most of the objects you use when programming.
We’ve also covered several other frameworks throughout this book, including the Address Book framework (chapter 9), the Address Book UI framework (chapter 9), the Core Location framework (chapter 10), the Core Audio framework (chapter 12), the Media Player framework (chapter 12), the Core Graphics framework (chapters 13), the Quartz Core framework (chapter 13), the OpenGL ES framework (chapter 13), the CFNetwork framework (chapter 14), the Game Kit Framework (chapter 15), the APNS framework (chapter 16), the Map Kit framework (chapter 17), and the Store Kit framework (chapter 18). Finally, you may wish to pay some attention to the Core Foundation framework, which we’ve used (as infrequently as possible) throughout the last part of this book.