Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
NOTE
The plug-in templates support only Apple-standard APIs. If you want to develop a plug-in for some other applica-
tion, such as an Adobe Photoshop 8BX plug-in or a VST (Virtual Studio Technology) music synthesizer or sound
processor, you typically need to download a suitable SDK or framework and add it to Xcode by hand.
Changing the Standard Templates
It's important to understand that no template is complete. Templates include a bare minimum of features and
are designed to eliminate repetitive set-up chores. They're not tutorials, and they're certainly not examples of
best practice.
Many useful methods from these classes are missing from the templates, and you should review the class refer-
ence documentation, described in Chapter 6, to learn more about them. Typically, your applications rely on
methods and properties that don't appear in the standard templates. The most productive templates are likely to
be the ones you create yourself. Custom template creation is an advanced topic and is introduced in Chapter
12. But editing the existing templates is relatively easy and can save you time even on simple projects.
Finding the template files
Currently, you can find the iOS template files in
/<Xcode Folder>/Platforms/
iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/Library/Xcode/Project Templates
The OS X templates are in
/<Xcode Folder>/Library/Xcode/Project Templates
For both platforms, the application templates are in
/Application
, and the others are in correspondingly
named folders.
CAUTION
If you are developing with multiple versions of Xcode, by default they all load their templates from these director-
ies—usually. These locations may change without notice in future versions of Xcode.
Figure 3.20 shows a view of the template file structure, with a list of files. The contents of each template are a
standard Xcode project. You can open the project in Xcode by double-clicking the
.xcodeproj
file.
FIGURE 3.20
Locating the iOS template files