Topic: xcode

Chiphone Meeting: Chicago iPhone user group gets its TDD on

John McCaffrey, Friday, August 28, 2009 @ 10:25 am

chiphone

Eric Smith from 8th light gave a hands-on TDD presentation at last night's Chiphone meeting, hosted at Obtiva's downtown office, (conveniently located near the the train).

There was a good crowd of people, most attendees have 'played around' with iphone development, 4 have actively developed apps (3 people have live apps in the store).  From my quick survey of those that have submitted apps, it seems most of them were free utility apps or simple games, with at least one commercial app Dash for Confluence. It also seemed that no one had yet needed to do any animation beyond the basics, with just a bit of core-animation, but no need for more lower-level openGL or animation engines.

Eric started off by saying that he's given talks on iPhone testing, but that just telling people what to do is not the same as letting them experience it for themselves,  so we did a Randori, where a pair starts working on some code, and every 3 minutes one person from the pair swaps out and chooses his replacement from the crowd.

What I liked about this was that I felt like I got to know the audience better, and actually watch people reason their way through the code or a testing/mocking issue.  (You know how sometimes you go to a user group, and it can be hard to get a chance to talk to others, or sometimes there is a 'know-it-all' guy, and you just want him to shut up. Knowing that you are going to have to go up there and code is a great way to silence those types)

When it was my turn,  there was an interesting issue with one of the tests that had us all stumped for a bit, but ultimately ended up being one of those problems where you need to deconstruct everything and build it back up. (The issue was that while we were trying to set fooController.textView.text = @"foobar", we hadn't instantiated a textView object, or set it on the controller yet.)
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Book Review: Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone

John McCaffrey, Friday, January 16, 2009 @ 3:04 pm


book cover

In Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone, Bill Dudney gives a good introduction to the Core Animation framework and some of the slick ways that you can spice up a Cocoa app for Mac OSX or the iPhone. Its assumed that you know your way around Xcode, and that you know the basics of Cocoa programming. So if you are new to Cocoa you may want to have a copy of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X handy, but you can get your hands on the code examples from Pragmatic Screencasts if you want to try and work your way through it.

The book gives a fair overview of the Core Animation framework, and helps to get you through some of the less intuitive parts. It quickly walks you through a few different examples of developing animation apps for the mac and then explains the differences and limitations of writing for the iPhone. I would also suggest reading through the apple docs which will help you understand some of the other tools available to you and also read more details on what you are working with.

Its a quick read, coming in at only 200 pages, and a lot of those pages are full-page images. Personally, I was hoping for a more thorough review and examples for the iPhone, and was dissapointed that there are only like 14 pages in the iPhone chapter, and 7 of them are a full page of a single image. (I think that might have something to do with the time the book was written and the state of the NDA for iPhone developers, but still I was disappointed).  You can get the pdf directly from the PragmaticProgrammers site, but you might want to check Amazon too.

Overall, I think the book gives a decent start to some animation concepts, and ways to improve your iPhone apps, but you might want to hold off on getting it now, and work your way through the existing docs and other sites first. I suspect the next generation of docs on this topic will have a much deeper review and will be worth the wait.

Now I’m looking for something that can give me a good overview of using OpenGL for the iPhone or something like Blender or Unity3d.

Related Services: iPhone Application Development, Custom Software Development

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iPhone SDK: Testing with TextMate & GTM

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

iPhone in Dock

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.

Related Services: iPhone Application Development, Custom Software Development

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