Xcode deleted my project and everything is gone. The only thing that I have is the app in my iPhone 6. So is there any way that I can retrieve the Xcode project of the app?
.. Update ..
i found all the files now i just need to reassemble them in a new project . but I don't know how .
Let's be clear: Xcode did not delete your project, you did, perhaps inadvertently. This does happen to most of us.
The answer is to recover from your remote Git repository or recover from Time Machine or another backup. If you do not have any backup this is your first warning that you need a backup strategy. Make this your last such warning by immediately, as in right now, creating a backup scheme, preferably two. Little is more important.
There are free remote Git repositories such as BitBucket. Setting up Time Machine is simple, just get an external disk, connect it and you will be prompted. Or use another backup scheme such as BackBlaze.
Without a backup you can recover the assets but not code from the ipa from your phone. If you are using the Asset Catalog that is not easy but can still be done.
Unfortunately,
There is no current way to un-archive an app. You must have the .xcodeproj file in order to make changes. The .ipa is useless in terms of editing or changing your app. And if there was a way to do so, it could and would be abused and many clones/copy's/fakes of popular apps will be published. The only accessible files are things in the Main Bundle which only include, .pngs, .jpg, .txt etc but no source code.
Related
I have a project in App Inventor that uses the TinyDB. In this project, I added an extension I couldn't delete and didn't want.
To solve this problem, I made a copy of the app, downloaded the copy as an aia, unzipped the project and fixed the problem, and then zipped it back up.
Then I deleted the copy on AI so I could upload the changed version. Everything went according to plan, and now I have an app with the problem and a fixed project under a different name.
My question is if I delete the problem app and save-as the copy under the original name, will the tags in the TinyDB still be there or will they be in a separate database that I can no longer access?
I tested this question with a simple app I made. Here are the steps I followed, you can skip to the bottom if you want the conclusion:
Methods:
Create a project
Drag in a list view component, two textboxes, a tinyDB, and a button. It doesn't have to look pretty, it just has to be functional
Go to blocks
Add in the blocks below
Build the apk and install it on your device. Store at least 1 tag.
Go back to AI. In the project, click Project>save as... and leave the project name at the default.
Delete the original
In the copy, click Projects>save as... and set the name to the original name you used.
Build the apk and install it on the device. Do not uninstall the first app you installed.
Confirm that the entries you added are still in the app.
Conclusion:
When testing this, I found that the data in the tinyDB would persist from the other version of the app. I think this was because the project name was the same, I was signing the app with the same digital signature, and the tinyDB namespace was the same.
Therefore, it is safe to change the name of the app and then change it back without losing the data on a user's device.
Further steps:
I would also like to test if this works when downloading the aia, unzipping it, and then zipping it back up and uploading it. I think that would yield the same result, but I have yet to test it.
We developed an app for our client and it is now available in the app store. Lets call it the MAIN APP here.
Now the client wants a separate version of that app, without changing anything but just the name of the MAIN APP. Let's call it the ALT APP here.
The MAIN APP has two Xcode projects, one is the older one, the other is the latest, which is the one what I am working on with new features.
I uploaded the first version of the ALT APP before by changing the app name and bundle ID of the older project of the MAIN APP. So you can think of it that the older project of the MAIN APP is now the project of the ALT APP
Now I need to update the features of the ALT APP to the same as the MAIN APP.
One way to do this is to copy paste the source files of the MAIN APP and overwrite it to the source files of the ALT APP but I think this takes time.
The other way I thought of is to just change the app name and bundle ID of the latest project of the MAIN APP, upload the ALT APP and then later on change it back when I need to upload the MAIN APP
But I am afraid that if I kept on changing the bundle ID there will be build problems(although I haven't encountered any yet).
Is there any better way to do this? Thanks in advance!
Make One Project.
Go to Project setting -> Build Setting
Change
Current Project Version
As you want.
Duplicate your 'base' target as you want
Go to Target -> General -> Version
and Write $(CURRENT_PROJECT_VERSION)
Change bundle identifier.
Go to Target -> Info and find 'Bundle name' and change it. That will be your app name.
I wish you can solve your problem.
This sounds a lot like you need to look into branching in your source code repository. Git in particular is suited to pulling individual commits between branches. Thus allowing you to select changes to copy. Providing you are careful about what you are committing.
Ultimately it sounds like your project is going to end up being an old code based with patches and a new code base with new features. Perhaps your client is not clear enough about what they want. Keeping two version of an app current in the app store would be a headache. Far better to retire one and move with the new.
Every time I meteor build, I have to open XCode and do the following:
remove and add an item from "Link Binary With Libraries" (Facebook SDK)
add a URL Type (custom URL scheme for my app)
add a "Required device capabilities" to "Custom iOS Target Properties"
How can I edit my Meteor project to have these steps done automatically, and to auto add things to AndroidManifest.xml?
In some way use mobile-config.js or cordova-build-override?
I'm happy to see another guy who is trying to build a hybrid application using Meteor / extending a Meteor Cordova iOS app, since I'm facing the very same issues. So I'm very happy to share my experiences and approaches with you. :-)
So far, I ended up with the following approach:
I created a base template for my iOS app using meteor build (not meteor run ios-device, since I did not know if Meteor does some optimizations for production code).
Then, I copied the whole Xcode project under /platforms/ios to another loaction and used this new project as my "master" project from then on. This project is being enriched with native code, e.g. it also includes the Cocoa Pods I'm needing.
Of course, I also did not want to copy files each and every time I trigger a new Meteor build. At least, I would like to have the Staging/www folder updated, as this is happening quite frequently.
So my first (rather naive) approach was
delete the Staging/www folder in the master project
replace it with a relative link (using Xcode's linking functionality) to the Staging/www folder inside the .meteor/local/.../ios/ project
This approach did not work, since the shell script used in the Meteor Xcode project can't handle these links.
My second approach is to create a symlink on the filesystem level instead. This works as it should, and I'm able to build the project in Xcode as it should.
I could have followed the same approach for the Cordova plugins folder, but I've decided to replace the plugins manually in order to get a better control over them, even it means a bit more effort then.
Having the symlink in place also means that Xcode's version management (and also SVN which I am using for everything) will ignore everything below Staging/www, which is good in my opinion, because I'm already versioning the webapp code in the Meteor project itself.
BTW: I've started a discussion thread on hybrid mobile app on the Meteor forums as well, but so far it did not get too much attraction:
https://forums.meteor.com/t/building-a-hybrid-meteor-cordova-app-share-experiences/8212
Maybe we could follow up on Meteor-specific things there, to have the Meteor community participate in the discussion?
EDIT: I would also like to share an approach that failed completely, at least for me, maybe I was too dumb... Before I used Meteor's Xcode template as the starting point, I also tried it "the other way round", i.e. I started with my already existing Xcode app project and tried to include Meteor's / Cordova's part by hand. Using this approach, I never managed to set everything up correctly. I had lots of troubles and also had to tweak a lot of the compiler / linker flags to even get the code compiling. This grew me a lot of gray hairs. But even after I managed to get everything to compile, Meteor hang during startup - and I never figured out why.
One remaining problem I'm still facing is that Meteor's hot code push functionality seems to have some severe issues on iOS, that are also documented as GitHub issues. It can happen that the iOS app gets completely broken and needs to be reinstalled. I tried the mdg:reload-on-resume package, but this did not work as it should and made things even worse. As far as I can tell from the GitHub discussions, one should better disable hot code push until the Meteor team has addressed these issues. Breaking the app completely due to code pushes is not what my users would expect.
Unfortunately plist values (and assumably AndroidManifest.xml as well) can only be changed by a plugin:
Add entry to iOS .plist file via Cordova config.xml
For testing purposes, I need to periodically deploy new builds of my iOS app to the device which has old data in its document folder. I'd like to be able to selectively update part of the data and control keep-new or keep-old behaviour for any files in the document folder.
Basically, the tooling support I want is to update only the data that changed when deploying to device. For example whatever in the dev-machine's Xcode project resource folder that are newer or different from their counterparts (files of the same names) on the device (by date, size, etc.) get transferred and their counterparts on the device get overwritten by those. Everything else is ignored.
An ideal scenario would be: When I hit BuildAndRun in Xcode, Xcode will figure out what data to transfer-and-overwrite-device-files and what not to based on some custom rules.
Is is possible to achieve this with Xcode?
UPDATE
I edited the above text to make it clear that I don't want to add app logic for data versioning. I want this to happen in my build-and-test pipeline (Xcode).
Normally, this is pretty simple. Everything that XCode sends goes in the resource bundle. If you update it on the device, you have to move it to the documents directory, as the resource bundle is write only.
Any resources that you might be updating on the device already need 'does document version exist' kind of logic, the only change you have is to maybe add some modification date stuff.
You do have the option in the run scheme to upload application data to the sandbox directory.
Here is a good starting point:-
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#recipes/xcode_help-devices_organizer/articles/copy_app_data_to_sandbox.html
In essence, you can download data from a device in the device manager and create an xcdata package. Edit this to contain just the stuff you want to upload.
You can then either upload this manually or specify it in the Edit Scheme dialog ( under options), so it gets uploaded every time you run the scheme.
Easiest way I see to do it is to encode a version number in the files, and the ones you need to update, you increase the version number on them in your code, so when it runs and encounters a file that has a lesser version number, it deletes or ignores it
We are developing an iPhone game and I would like to know if is possible to copy new or updated assets (images, animations, sounds or whatever) on the device and test them without rebuilding the application in XCode.
We would like to simplify the production pipeline process and we are trying to avoid our artists to rebuild the application every time they modify the assets.
Any advice is much appreciated.
Fede
Yes, I did it in one of my projects.
My strategy was easy, at the start, I stored the new assets in the app documents folder using a wifi tool specially created for that. Then, when the game needed a resource it checked if it was at the documents folder, if there was, it loaded, if not, it loaded the one from the bundle.
No, because any files that are updated in the XCode side will need to be rebundled and rebuilt. I'm surprised that this is an issue because the build process is remarkably faster between cleans. You're probably not rebuilding the entire application from scratch (ie after a Clean) each time, are you? XCode should detect any resource changes and update them on the device.