Ios Glossary

Browse 15 ios terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

15 Ios Terms

CocoaPods
A dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects, managing library installation and linking via a central Podfile specification. Largely...
Delegate
A type-safe function pointer (in C#) or a design pattern (in iOS/Cocoa) where one object hands off responsibility for certain behaviors to another object. In...
Mobile Development
The discipline of building applications for mobile operating systems — primarily iOS and Android — using native SDKs (Swift/Kotlin), cross-platform frameworks...
Native App
A mobile or desktop application built using platform-specific languages and frameworks (Swift/Kotlin), giving full access to device APIs and optimal...
NSObject
The root base class of virtually all Objective-C classes in Apple's frameworks, providing fundamental behaviors like memory management, introspection, and...
Objective-C
A superset of C that adds Smalltalk-style message passing, used as the primary language for Apple's macOS and iOS development before Swift. Objective-C's...
Retain Cycle
A memory leak pattern in reference-counted systems where two or more objects hold strong references to each other, preventing the runtime from ever...
Run Loop
An event-processing loop (particularly Apple's CFRunLoop/NSRunLoop) that waits for and dispatches input sources, timers, and observers on a thread. The main...
Size Class
In memory allocators like jemalloc or tcmalloc, a predefined bucket of allocation sizes (e.g., 8, 16, 32, 64 bytes) used to reduce fragmentation by rounding...
State Restoration
The process of saving an application's UI state — such as scroll position, navigation stack, and in-progress form data — before the app is suspended or...
Swift
Apple's modern programming language for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS development, designed as a successor to Objective-C. Swift combines high performance with...
SwiftData
Apple's declarative data persistence framework introduced in iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma that uses Swift macros (like @Model) to turn plain Swift classes into...
SwiftUI
Apple's declarative UI framework for building interfaces across iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS using Swift, where the UI is described as a function of state and...
Table View
A scrollable UI component that displays data in a single-column list of rows, optionally grouped into sections — most associated with UITableView in iOS/UIKit,...
Xcode
Apple's integrated development environment for macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS development. Includes a code editor, Interface Builder, simulator, profiler...

Related Topics