I wonder if Objective-C/Foundation has any special commands for reading user input from the console. Since it has NSLog for output maybe there is something else I could use
The only real Cocoa support for input is NSFileHandle's fileHandleWithStandardInput. It isn't really more useful than scanf() if you ask me. But for getting input into specific types, well, that's pretty much NSFormatter's thing. There are already a lot of predefined formatter types for standard things, and you can make a custom formatter if you have more specialized needs. So if you need something a little more than scanf(), just read in the data (either as bytes with scanf() or data with NSFileHandle) and make an NSString from it and you can format it to your heart's content.