iPhone SDK: Testing with TextMate & GTM

Ivan Moscoso, Wednesday, November 26, 2008 @ 12:30 pm

Developing in Xcode, I keep my project default "SDKROOT" and Target set to the default for the iPhone device and 'Release', respectively.

That said, I have been trying out TextMate as an alternative to Xcode, thanks to all of the great things TextMate provides (I won't go into all that here, since there are already many great resources on the web). For those iPhone developers who are new to the Mac platform, or to TextMate for that matter, here's a quick tip (and be sure to check install Xcode bundle first).

First, as always, an obligatory shout-out to Google Toolbox for Mac. I am testing my code with GTM, and set the following environment variables so that Xcode plugin for TextMate could run a build / tests accordingly.

  TM_BUILDSTYLE = "Debug"
  TM_TARGET = "Test SDKROOT=Test SDKROOT=iphonesimulator2.1"

This presumes you followed the GTM directions by creating a 'Test' target to run your tests, and also that you are targeting the 2.1 version of the iPhone simulator's firmware. Replace that last argument with 'iphonesimulator2.2' if you are targeting the recently released 2.2 firmware.

With these two settings, everything works great. I can write a bit of code, and run the build. Xcode definitely does a lot, and has its place in development, but I feel that the ease of use in TextMate outweighs the code completion of editing files in Xcode in cases where the code that I am working with is familiar to me.

Wherever I am working with new API's or need to constantly refer to documentation, Xcode is still worth it, particularly after you map some essential keyboard shortcuts (but that's another post). For familiar API's however, you can't beat the productivity gains of just coding in TextMate.

agile ajax

Comments

• Leave a comment
• Comment feed for this post
• TrackBack URL

None so far.

Leave a comment