I'm toying around with development on Mac OS 9 using Macintosh Programmers Workshop. I notice in the CImports folder there is a CFString.h with our beloved Core Foundation string.
I've managed to build and run a stdio-based hello world, but when I try to use CFString functions such as CFSTR("my string") or CFStringGetLength(myStr) this results in a linker error.
How do I configure MPW to find the correct libraries for linking? Also, are there resources out there for a developer who knows C but has never approached MPW?
I've reached this point by following this tutorial: https://sites.google.com/site/chuzzum/macintosh-c-programming-guide/macintosh-development-environments/getting-started-with-mpw
It's been ages since I last tinkered with MPW, but the gist is that you need to link against CarbonLib.
I hope you've already discovered the option-enter shortcut for running commands through Commando. That makes things a lot easier.
Related
While I'm exploring Playground Book sample code, like this one, I find it to be very tedious to get the code to run because of Playground Book's limitations in where the code can run: only on iPad's Swift Playground.
There is no way to debug the "Sources" / Auxiliary code in iOS's Swift Playground, since all the source files are shown in un-editable plain text. You have to open the source files in Xcode to edit them, but then you can't compile or run them!
This is especially tedious for the sample code above, which uses PlaygroundValue, a persistence API that requires Playground Book format, so I still couldn't get the code to run by separating all source code into a separate Playground file to run on the Mac.
Since the sample code above is outdated, I find it to be near impossible to debug it right and get the code to run. You'd have to:
Deploy the code on iPad. Run the Book.
See many error messages on iPad.
Go back to Xcode on Mac and debug them one by one, manually.
Deploy the code on iPad again to run. Repeat the process.
Even after all the errors are resolved, you can still be faced with cryptic "Problem Running Playground" without any further concrete explanation.
What's your workflow to productively debug and deploy code with Playground Book? Current workflow seems impractical to me I think there must be a better way, but I'm not familiar enough with Playground Book and my online research doesn't yield any reasonable workarounds.
From a bug report / suggestion I sent to Apple, I got the following reply:
We’ve actually built tools to help debug the auxilliary sources and we did a presentation at WWDC 2018 that demonstrates it. Please view the presentation and get access to the tools here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/413/
Upon further research, I found that they have recently released a Playgrounds Author Template:
The Swift Playgrounds Author Template is a starter Xcode project that will help you create, debug, and produce a Playground book. Using the template you can step through the code for your live view as if it were an app so that you can identify bugs more easily and develop an efficient workflow for developing your Playground books.
This template, requiring Swift 4.1 to run, includes three different targets:
PlaygroundBook
Book_Sources
LiveViewTestApp
You can use the LiveViewTestApp to fully debug your Playground Book right on your Mac with Xcode.
I am not aware of any possibility that does not require you to test the Playground on an actual iPad.
Anyway, you can make developing Swift Playgrounds less tedious by
Using iCloud to synchronize your mac version with the iPad.
Embedding your Playground in an Xcode project as described in one of my previous answers. That way, you can at least achieve autocompletion during development.
Linking your source files to another target, so that compile errors can be caught before running the Playground.
Anyway, you will still encounter mysterious "Problem Running Playground" errors from time to time
I'm completely confused and I don't know where to start asking questions. I tried googling, but the terminology is confusing and I'm not sure what either of these things do (except for Xcode). Can someone explain like I'm 5?
I'm on the cocos2d-swift website and after reading the getting started section it says "From this point onwards, using SpriteBuilder is optional.". I don't know what they mean by that.
How do each of these correlate with each other?
Also, how is an API Documentation Browser and Code Snippet Manager useful to an everyday iOS Developer?
cocos2d-swift is a framework that enables you to build things like sprite-based games quickly.
SpriteBuilder is a tool that helps you build your own multilayered sprites (images and animations grouped into a single package -- i.e. Mario, a Goomba, a Fireflower fireball, etc.).
Xcode is a developer environment in which you write your source code, compile, distribute, and test.
CocoaPods is a tool that fetches and manages framework/SDK dependancies.
You would use CocoaPods to fetch the cocos2d-swift framework so that you could build a sprite-based game in Xcode using sprites you generated in SpriteBuilder.
Not sure what Cocos2d is, but swift is the latest programming language by Apple for both OS X and iOS development.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)
SpriteBuilder is a framework used to create games for iOS very quick. Think of it as a game engine.
http://www.spritebuilder.com/about
Xcode is the IDE (integrated development environment) that you use when writing native OS X and iOS applications. It's awesome!
CocoaPods is a way to load in third-party libraries and frameworks without having to manually install them on your own. It also makes it very easy to keep the frameworks up-to-date. Pods also allows your project to be more portable as it's much easier to install an application with multiple dependancies via Pods.
http://cocoapods.org
A documentation browser is good if you want to have access to documentation while offline. However, I almost always use Google to find what I'm looking for regardless of what technology I'm working on. Google is just the best way to search.
Finally, I'd start off with this book. I read the first edition years ago, and made things very easy for me to understand.
http://www.bignerdranch.com/we-write/ios-programming.html
Hope this helps!
Here are some basics:
XCode (A Program)- Most of your iOS development will happen here. Coding, creating the app etc.
Think of an SDK as a suite of commands or tools you can use-API's (API - Application programming interface)
Cocoas2d (An SDK) - Game engine. A software development kit for creating games. you would pull this library of code and tools into xcode to use it.
SpriteBuilder (An SDK) - Suite of tools for building games. Just like Cocoas, you would pull this into xCode to make use of it as you code.
CocoaPods - A tool for linking/loading SDK's into XCode and easily updating them.
Moral of the story: XCode is the software you will use for everything. Everything else are just additional libraries of code you can pull in.
Good day
I have created a static library with Xcode. Then I compiled my ANE using adobe's ADT tool. Thereafter I've included the ANE in my FlashBuilder project. However, when attempting to package my project, I get the following error:
"Error occurred while packaging the application:
Undefined Symbols: "_obj_storeStrong", referenced from ...
.
"_obj_release", referenced from ...
.
"
My guess is that ARC is probably not supported for ANE's. I'm guessing that this is probably due to the fact that FlashBuilder is recompiling the entire AIR + the native libs into one iOS application, probably using their own compiler or something (which is why Air apps for iOS can be compiled on windows platforms as well), and this compiler is probably not 4.3 ready yet?
I have attempted adding the flag -fobjc-arc to my ios-platformoptions.xml as well (where this file is the parameter to the -platformoptions flag of adt), but still no joy. It results once again in an error when packaging. Perhaps any other flag I can try to use here?
Any corrections, suggestions, alternative ideas or comments will be most welcome. I am very new to Xcode, Objective C and ANE, so please excuse any incorrect statements or assumptions, and please correct me on these.
I would be glad if somebody can please confirm weather I am correct with my assumption that I cannot use ARC at this stage on ANE's.
Thanks
Christo
START EDIT:
Very late update, sorry.
You might be able to use ARC after all. There is a library called arc lite that I forgot to mention and it works. I created an ANE for MapKit on iOS targeting the 5.0.x SDK. When I tried to move to a device that only had 4.3.x ( could have been 4.3.3 or 4.3.5 ) the app crashed or would not compile. I found information on the arc lite library that is included in the newer sdks, followed the instructions on how to include this library and pow! A working ANE on a 4.3.x device without rewriting my code!
Hope all of this helps and half of my original comment :)
Markus
END EDIT
I don't think ARC is supported just yet. There isn't much to go on in terms of settings or examples of what the settings should be in Xcode. Take a look at any of the Xcode ANE projects you can get your hands on. You will see that most or all of the projects have:
Object-C Automatice Reference counting = NO
Objective-C++ Automatic Reference counting = NO
Take a look at the following:
Vibration ANE - On Adobe Devnet site
Liquid Photo - http://www.liquid-photo.com/2011/10/30/common-native-extension-issues/
Liquid Photo - http://www.liquid-photo.com/2011/10/28/native-extension-for-adobe-air-and-ios-101/
There are a lot of examples in Github but you have to find them via Google. Pull down the Xcode ANE projects and compare the settings.
Hope this helps!!!
Markus
I'm trying to use Time Profiler, I've used it before.
I'm hiding system libraries, but all of my symbol names are HEX.
I'm running in debug, I have debugSymbols turned on....
I've restarted everything a few times and cleaned everything in between..
... anybody got any other ideas?
it's a bit of a pain because there are a number of variables that can cause this. some of the more common ones are:
sometimes you need to tell instruments where to find your files and/or symbols (Preferences->Search Paths).
have you enabled Link Time Optimization (LTO)? it should be off.
sometimes it helps if you do a clean/build.
sometimes it helps if you restart instruments.
in earlier versions of Xcode, it helped to use a central build directory.
verify that you are generating the proper level of debug symbols for all targets.
I no longer get this problem with the latest version.
Apple were no help in answering this for me - even though I used one of my Tech Support Requests. Must have had them stumped too.
Is there any centralized repository of useful Objective-C / Cocoa libraries as there is for Perl, Ruby, Python, etc.?
In building my first iPhone app, I'm finding myself implementing some very basic functions that would be just a quick "gem install" away in Ruby.
There's a project for that! It's called CocoaPods!
Homepage: http://cocoapods.org/
Source: https://github.com/CocoaPods/CocoaPods
Unfortunately not :(
There are some very useful sites however. I find one of the best is cocoadev.com as it contains lots of useful information about many of the more obscure classes usually including snippets of code to do some really cool things :)
Maybe we (the cocoa community) should look into building something like this!
Oh and I just remembered this site cocoadevcentral.com which is also very good for starting out with cocoa.
Daniel mentioned http://cocoadev.com.
More specifically, check out http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?ObjectLibrary.
"This page is for tracking re-usable Cocoa classes that can be mixed, matched, and dropped fairly easily into existing Cocoa projects to add useful functionality."
I'd be interested in what kind of "basic functions" you're having to implement. There's actually quite a lot already there in the provided libraries, and I wonder if you're just not finding functionality that's already there...
There's a new index of reusable code for Mac OS and iOS: Cocoa Objects
I might be confused or missing something here... But doesn't apple provide all the Foundation / Cocoa / AppKit / CoreAudio / Qtkit / etc libraries that should provide all of the very basic functions you are looking for?
Other than what xcode comes with or is on the apple dev site, there are no centralized repo's for Cocoa.
Google Code also has some objective C things up. It depends on what you are looking for...
Also see GitHub, many useful Objective-C projects, especially re iPhone. See activerecord & cocoaoniguruma, for instance.
http://github.com/search?q=objective-c
http://github.com/search?q=objc
Google has Google toolbox for mac which got me started unit testing my iPhone application which was the main thing I found missing.