xcode
Latest
Microsoft backs Epic's request to keep using Apple developer tools
Microsoft has filed a statement supporting Epic's concern that Apple might be threatening all Unreal Engine game developers.
Apple will give the option to buy iOS and Mac apps as a bundle
The latest beta of Apple's Xcode development tool adds a small but nifty feature that will make it easier in some situations to buy apps you want to use across iOS and macOS. Developers who decide to take advantage of the feature will be able to bundle together different versions of an app into a single "Universal Purchase." If you buy one version, you'll then get access to the other automatically. As part of the same change, developers will also have the option to sell unified in-app purchases.
Apple's latest acquisition will bolster its tools for app developers
Apple is no stranger to acquisitions. Back in 2014, it bought the company behind TestFlight, a system that lets iOS developers get their app out to tens of thousands of beta testers ahead of launch. Now the company has purchased Buddybuild, a company that helps app developers test and manage their apps on the iOS platform.
There's an inactive one-handed keyboard hidden inside iOS code
In these days of big iPhones, smaller-handed individuals have trouble typing up a storm on their iOS devices. However, since iOS 8 (at least), Apple has toyed with an edge-swipe activated one-hand keyboard. To keep characters closer to your thumb, it squishes character keys and expands copy and paste buttons, keeping the word prediction rail above the keys. Alas, it still remains unfinished and inaccessible, hidden away in the iPhone's Xcode.
Apple removes malware-infected apps from Chinese App Store
Last week we reported how a number of malware-ridden apps were found on the Chinese version of Apple's App Store. The iPhone-maker has since confirmed the offending apps have been removed. The malicious apps were reportedly created using a bogus version of Xcode (the developer tool for iOS apps) that snuck hidden, malicious features into genuine apps with a program called "XcodeGhost". Curiously, a tactic also considered by the CIA at one point. Exactly how many apps were affected is unclear, but popular titles in the country like WeChat, and car-hailing app Didi Kuaidione are reported to be on the list. Security firm Qihoo360 Technology is reporting at least 344 were removed from the store.
Malware-ridden apps found in Apple's Chinese App Store
The iOS App Store is usually a trustworthy source of software. But as hackers tend to do, they found a way to get their nefarious wares into the China version of the software supermarket. By using altered versions of Apple' development tool Xcode they were able to slip malware into apps being built by unaware devs. The problem started when developers downloaded altered versions of Xcode (named "XcodeGhost" Alibab researchers) from third-party sites. When apps built with the modified compiler are launched, they collect the phone's name, UUID, language and country, current time and network type. That data is then encrypted and sent to servers. Not a huge breach, but no one wants to be tracked by unknown sources.
How the CIA planned to hijack Apple's developer tools
That your government will spy on you should, sadly (by now) come as no surprise. But, some of the ways they go about it still trigger disbelief. The Intercept claims to have received documents outlining methods the CIA has considered to access data on Apple products. The usual talk of decrypting and vulnerabilities is present, but there's one technique in particular that seems especially nefarious. Reportedly, the CIA went as far as creating a modified version of Xcode (an Apple tool that developers use to make apps). The hijacked Xcode would unwittingly include code in the final app without the developer knowing. The Intercept's sources also claim OS X's updater (that automatically installs the latest version of OS X) was targeted with a modification that would install a keylogger onto your Mac. Fun.
As of February 1, Apple will require all new app submissions to be 'optimized for iOS 7'
Apple on Tuesday posted an announcement on its iOS Developer page stating that as of February 1, all new app submissions, and even app updates, must be built with the latest version of Xcode 5. What's more, all new apps and app updates must be optimized for iOS 7. So if you're a developer beholden to the look and feel of iOS 6, it's probably a good time to reluctantly embrace iOS 7 if you want to see your app gain entry into the App Store. I don't imagine, though, that this will be much of an issue given that many developers have enthusiastically adjusted the look and feel of their apps to more closely mirror iOS 7's design aesthetic. The developer posting was accompanied by a link to Apple's revamped iOS Human Interface Guidelines in case anyone is curious as to what iOS 7 optimization entails.
Friday Favorite: How Keyboard Maestro saved my Mavericks macros
Bless Keyboard Maestro. It's not as if we haven't already given it coverage here at TUAW, but I fought to make it today's Friday Favorite because it pulled my grits out of the fire after I upgraded to Mavericks. Me? I've been a Quickeys user since the freaking 1980's. One gets used to an app. Used to it enough that the thought of having to transition away from my decades-old keyboard macros to a new app was giving me hives. So I resisted, resisted, and then I resisted some more. After Lion debuted, I made excuse after excuse -- dropped a few of my daily macros, adjusted some others, and kept pushing forward with my old system just so I wouldn't have to start again from scratch. Startly, the guys who now own the app, hemmed and hawed, made some noises about eventual upgrades, but I was basically running abandonware. Finally when Mavericks debuted, my decades old macro set gave up the ghost. Even doing some emergency tweaks like switching off App Nap couldn't save my workflow. TJ Luoma, who had had just about enough of my "but my system works...or at least it worked" nonsense finally hit me over the head with a very large clue mackerel1. (The size of the clue-fish indicates how much this matters.) "Just. Use. Keyboard. Maestro." (I paraphrase.) So I did. Several weeks later, I am a rabid Keyboard Maestro fan. From its easy to use editor (with folders!) to its nuanced rule system (I can disable my keyboard Emacs equivalents for Terminal, Xcode, and Text Edit because they're already built into those apps natively), Keyboard Maestro is doing everything that Quickeys ever did for me but is doing it more smoothly, faster (seriously, no playback lag), and reliably. I love this app. It handles app launching, menu selections, complex sequences, and offers a solid Recording option that lets me demonstrate tasks rather than programming them. I can easily enable and disable shortcuts, which allows me to switch instantly from standard development mode to testing out Xcode betas. That's a huge time-consuming task for me usually. (Hint: You can bet I immediately remapped the new documentation keys for Xcode 5.1.) It's not just useful for development. I'm using Keyboard Maestro to apply AppleScript to QuickTime Player, adding timed skip actions for moving forward and back through videos. I've got it set up to enter my family's library card in Safari for when we need to reserve books. It's working in mail, helping to sort mail as I work through my inbox. In other words, it's not only doing all the tasks I normally relied on for my macros, it's opening new opportunities for me as I continue to explore its amazingly wide range of hooks. Keyboard Maestro costs US$36. It's free to download and you have 30 days to try it out before buying. I think I made it to day 3 before whipping out my Visa card. 1 The mackerel was, of course, a holy mackerel.
Tis the season to subscribe: What's on my annual service renewal lists
As November rolls around, it's generally time for me to take stock, look at my current service subscriptions (as opposed to entertainment subscriptions like Netflix and Hulu) and weigh what items I'm going to invest in for the next twelve months. Some of my subscriptions are annual choices. They time out after 12 months. Others are ongoing, so a time to evaluate and choose is especially helpful. Of course, services are a highly personal thing. The ones I subscribe to may or may not meet your needs and vice versa. So I've tried to keep my list of the services I'm considering fairly general and Apple consumer specific. If you have suggestions to add, please drop them in the comments -- and let me know if you run across particular deals that crop up near Black Friday. Offsite Backup. Time Machine, which I swear by, will get you only so far in life. Unless you're backing up offsite, you're exposing your data to enormous risk. Any physical damage to your workspace will probably affect your onsite backups as well as your main system. Offsite means greater peace of mind. Personally, I'm a Crashplan customer due to the unlimited backups and reasonable yearly fees. (Plus Mike Evangelist really sold me on the service.) Regardless of which provider you go with, you really should be thinking about adding an offsite plan to your Black Friday grab bag. Last year, Crashplan offered an insanely sweet deal for new customers (which I missed out on by two freaking weeks) so keep your eyes open for theirs and other deals on the day. VPN Service. If you lean towards the Wi-Fi lifestyle (and I do), when hanging out at Panera, Einsteins, Starbucks, and so forth, you'll probably want to consider picking up a VPN subscription for the year. There's a lot of give and take between Wi-Fi and onboard cellular, but the biggest difference is security. When you grab data directly over cellular, you can generally feel pretty good about privacy. Using shared Wi Fi means compromise -- speed, reliability, transparency. Using VPN enables you to shop, read mail, and perform other personal tasks without worrying about snooping. I've been using Witopia this year and it's been pretty good. I find it much better for light surfing and email when on the go than for privacy when at home, so about 90% of my use has been on my iPad and MacBook Air. Although I had intended to use VPN for day-to-day work, I found that heavy data loads (such as downloading new versions of Xcode) over VPN is just an exercise in frustration. Cloud. I want my data wherever I am. I'm a big fan of Dropbox and not such a big fan of iCloud but that's just me. Your mileage will, of course, vary -- and there are many new providers now out there in the field. This is a really good time of year to hunt for cloud deals for pro level accounts. Just be aware that real life stories like Everpix demonstrate why you need to be very, very careful as to where you trust your data. Online Apps. Unlike last year, this is the year that subscribing to cloud-based applications really took off. You might want to take a peek at Adobe, Microsoft Office, or Apple's iWork to see if their offerings might be what you need for next year. I'm intrigued by iWork in particular, and looking forward to seeing how well it transforms my work flow from desk-based to mobile. What services do you subscribe to? And which ones are you considering testing for the first time this year?
Apple releases Xcode 5.0.2, fixes iOS Simulator hang
After initially seeding it to developers last week, Apple has released Xcode 5.0.2 to the masses. If you're an iOS developer, you'll be happy to hear Apple has apparently fixed that nasty iOS Simulator hang bug that quite a few people were complaining about. Besides that, the new version of Xcode fixes another iOS 6 bug and includes your standard stability improvements. What's New in Version 5.0.2 Includes SDKs for OS X 10.9 Mavericks, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, and iOS 7. • Fixes occasional hangs in iOS Simulator during app install, or when debugging. • Fixes a crash that could occur while debugging on devices running iOS 6. • Additional bug fixes and stability improvements. Xcode is a free download from the Mac App Store.
Aardman's Full Steam Ahead edu-app shows great promise, early flaws
You know Aardman Animations, don't you? Cheese? Gromit? Were-Rabbits? They've teamed with the Science Museum and Brunel's ss Great Britain to create Full Steam Ahead, a free educational app that teaches children about ship design. In each stage of the app, you're presented with a basic design. It's up to you to iteratively improve that design -- whether for load bearing or stability, and so forth -- to learn about a basic underlying engineering concept. It's a brilliant idea and beautifully presented, but it's one that's showing quite a lot of early instability. In my testing, it repeatedly crashed on a clean, rebooted iPad. I was able to re-launch and pick up my exploration, but the sheer number of crashes really got on my nerves. Being a developer, I connected my iPad to Xcode to see why this was happening. It turned out that the app was constantly being warned of excessive memory use and being terminated by the system watchdog. In addition to these crashes, the app would move really slowly at times and get caught up in lengthly transitions as the app "built" the ship to test. Apart from these complaints, I very much liked this game. It provides exactly the educational experience of learning by doing, offering just enough in the way of tips (for example, pointing out that the student's focus should be on modifying the shape of the hull) to keep a student engaged. While the vocabulary, overly fussy fonts and small text size might prove challenging to elementary school students (not to mention their myopic parents), I think Full Steam Ahead is a great match to any middle schooler, especially those with an inclination towards pursuing design and engineering.
Apple releases iOS 7 and Xcode Gold Master builds to developers
Say bye, bye to beta versions as Apple is rounding out its big iPhone announcement event with the expected release of the gold master version of iOS 7 and Xcode. The two builds are available to download from Apple's Developer Center. There is no OTA update for iOS 7, so for the time being, you must download the IPSW from Apple's website and do a manual install. Happy developing, y'all!
DevJuice: About that Xcode beta...
A few things you should note about yesterday's Xcode beta release... First, new sizes and naming updates apply to asset catalogs. Here's my latest list of what I believe you need to be building on a per-app basis for icons. No, none of this is documented anywhere. I also believe there were no changes to launch images. AppIcon40x40@2x~ipad.png AppIcon40x40~ipad.png AppIcon29x29@2x.png AppIcon60x60@2x.png AppIcon29x29@2x~ipad.png AppIcon76x76@2x~ipad.png AppIcon29x29~ipad.png AppIcon76x76~ipad.png AppIcon40x40@2x.png Second, pay special care to the beta API diffs -- especially anyone doing view controller layout. I just spent 4 hours updating a common pattern throughout several books of sample code. Finally, is it just me, or is that the ugliest Xcode update ever?
DevJuice: Adding warnings for TODO and FIXME comments
A clever post from deallocatedobjects cropped up on IRC on Friday, and I thought I'd share its wisdom. The post discusses how you can add a custom build phase to automatically show TODO and FIXME comments as warnings in your Xcode 4 (and later) projects. It takes very little work. Select a target and choose Editor > Add Build Phase > Add Run Script Build Phase. Paste the following bash script in: KEYWORDS="TODO:|FIXME:|\?\?\?:|\!\!\!:" find "${SRCROOT}" \( -name "*.h" -or -name "*.m" \) -print0 | xargs -0 egrep --with-filename --line-number --only-matching "($KEYWORDS).*\$" | perl -p -e "s/($KEYWORDS)/ warning: \$1/" According to the write-up, credit goes to "Tim" on the Cocos2D forums. Thanks, swillits
DevJuice: Organize code snippets with Code Collector Pro
Code Collector Pro (on sale for US$9.99, normally $19.99) offers a snippet manager for your development needs. I bought myself a copy a few weeks ago, when it suddenly went on sale, and have spent the time since kicking its wheels. I was surprised to find out how much I like it. It offers excellent language-specific contextual highlighting, flexible tag support and easy-to-use searching. Whenever you have a snippet you want to store, just add a new item, paste and edit its metadata. I installed it into my Dock on day one, and it's been there ever since. I have not yet found a reason to close it, hide it or put it away. That's a big deal for me given how zealously I guard my permanent Dock items. Previously, I've tried using special-purpose Xcode projects, TextEdit files and even Notes to organize code bits. I was never really satisfied with any of those solutions. Code Collector Pro was built specifically for these kinds of short methods and functions that don't fit into class categories or helper libraries and it's doing a grand job in keeping those labeled, readable and (most importantly) findable. I really like the app and I suspect that you will too. There's a free 14-day trial available on the dev website and the app can be purchased at the Mac App Store.
DevJuice: Launch image and app icon naming scheme
Some things aren't particularly obvious, but can be very handy to know for when you need them. With the hope that this will be useful to our DevJuice community, TUAW presents the following without further comment: LaunchImage-700@2x~iphone LaunchImage-700-568h@2x~iphone LaunchImage-700-Portrait~ipad LaunchImage-700-Portrait@2x~ipad LaunchImage-700-Landscape~ipad LaunchImage-700-Landscape@2x~ipad AppIcon72x72@2x AppIcon72x72 AppIcon60x60@2x AppIcon50x50@2x AppIcon50x50 AppIcon29x29@2x AppIcon29x29
DevJuice: Spark Inspector offers real time iOS interface inpection
Spark Inspector (US$39.99 single-license) offers an exciting new development tool. Targeting devs looking to refine their user interfaces, it enables you to interactively tweak view properties like frames and layers. The app centers around an Interface Builder-like experience, with familiar-looking attribute and size inspectors. If you're comfortable in Xcode 4, you'll easily find your way around this tool. In addition, it provides a custom layer inspector -- one that could (and, honestly should) inspire Apple. It enables you to update layer attributes like shadows and transforms, while viewing the results in real time. Perfect for devs who otherwise write their interfaces in code (I am guilty as charged), it breaks out of the tweak-build-run loop that takes up so much time and energy in the normal development day. Instead, you apply your tweaks within the app itself, adjusting the interface until it looks just right. This is the point at which Spark Inspector displays its one big weakness (keep in mind that it's still in development). Instead of producing an updated XIB (which would be okay) or PaintCode-like Objective-C output suitable for re-integration to your apps (which would kick ass), you take responsibility for transferring values back to your Xcode project. Honestly, It's not a huge deal -- especially when your tweaks change a constant from say 50 to 58.5 -- but it's something that could be a killer feature in future updates. For now, you make notes of what values worked best for you. And no, there's no "bookmark this UI for later comparison" option either, another thing I would have liked to have seen. One of Spark Inspector's nicest features is its 3D extrusion display. This pushes views out in parent-child hierarchies, letting you explore and select items with more tangible visualization than you get in IB. Spark Inspector also offers a notification inspector, which may be useful for some devs. If you're already writing your UIs from code, however, you probably know how to set up a listener that logs notifications. Setup is easy. There's a setup assistant for configuring Xcode projects, or (if you're paranoid like I am) add both the SparkInspector and libz frameworks to your dev builds, making sure to enable the -ObjC flag in Other Linker Flags. Include the SparkInspector header as such: and enable the inspector in your application delegate, typically in application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: Make sure you test using the simulator, and not (as I first tried) on device. The standalone Spark Inspector app (DMG) must be running. As soon as your app hits the "enable observation" stage, it seamlessly connects to the inspector, and you're ready to test and tweak. For forty bucks, this promises to be a valuable tool that many devs will benefit from. If you'd like to kick the tires before you buy, there's a free 30 day trial available on the Spark Inspector website. If you do decide to buy, you purchase directly from the vendor.
DevJuice: Three useful Xcode tricks
Some Xcode challenges seem to crop up repeatedly. Today, I thought I'd share a few solutions that you might find helpful to integrate into your workflow. Challenge: When you move an Xcode project to a new folder, all your file references die. Solution: Avoid those red "can't find" file references by changing the way each group defines its location. If you're pulling in a suite of code from another folder, select it and open the File inspector (View > Utilities > Show File Inspector). Choose "Absolute Path" from the Path pop-up. Now, when you move the folder, those files remain fixed to the original location. You won't "lose" them in the update. Challenge: Your project is jam-packed with groups and subgroups and you want to find a file in your project. Solution: Start with File > Open Quickly (Command-Shift-O). Enter enough text to locate the file name you're looking for. Once you find the right name, for example "BezierFunctions.m", select the name and click Open. The file now appears in the workspace editor. Right-click within the editor and choose Reveal in Project Navigator from the contextual pop-up. Presto, Xcode finds that file for you, opens its parent group or groups, enabling you to manage the file and within its group setting. Challenge: You're using a function or type and want to quickly reference the original declaration. Solution: Move your mouse to the item in-code, and Command-click. Xcode immediately jumps to the original definition file. Alternatively, press the Option key. The cursor switches to "?" and a dashed highlight appears under the item name. Click to reveal a pop-up menu. Choices on this menu vary, depending on whether the selected item is custom or system supplied. In this screenshot's example, you can click on BaseGeometry.h to open the file that declared the POINT_IS_NULL macro, providing an equivalent result to command-clicking. The option-click trick also offers more info in addition to the move-to-declaration option, particularly for system-supplied items. Yes, you can jump directly to the CGPath.h header file using this little trick, but you can also read a description summary or hop to the class reference document.
Xcode 4.6 released alongside iOS 6.1
Mac and iOS developers get some update love from Apple today, too. That's because Xcode has been bumped up a notch to version 4.6 to bring support for iOS 6.1 along with some other under-the-hood improvements. Weighing in at 1.54 GB, the update is now available via Software Update and the Mac App Store. Straight from Apple's own release notes, here's what v4.6 of the SDK has to offer: Code completion heuristics are more accurate, and use an optimized default data set. New compiler warnings help identify potential bugs when using ARC and weak references. C++11 support for 'user defined literals' and 'unrestricted unions' features. Debugger can inspect elements within NSArray or NSDictionary objects. Analyze now performs deeper cross-function static analysis of Objective-C and C++ code. The number of indexing passes is reduced due to improved dependency checking. Additional bug fixes and stability improvements.
