Virtual Outpost

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Archive for March, 2012

Finder window showing blank white page for home directory

Mar 14

Posted by Walt Sellers in Regular Post | No Comments

Weird stuff.  My home folder has been just showing a blank white page lately.   Whenever I make a new window,  its just white.

If I scroll up or down, everything appeared.  If I typed the name of something and hit Command-O  or command-down-arrow it would open just fine.

Since I touch-type and use keyboard shortcuts a lot, it hasn’t gotten in the way, but it has been worrisome.

Just a few minutes ago I recalled an old memory that Finder would only store some settings when you close a window with the red chicklet button.

I opened a new window, scrolled to make things show up, selected a subfolder and closed with the button.  Now all my new windows show things properly again.

Finding Xcode’s Pre-defined Macros for iOS Devices

Mar 11

Posted by Walt Sellers in iOS Development, iPhone & iPod Touch, Software Development, Tips, XCode, XCode-4 | No Comments

I regret not making better notes about exactly why I was looking for a full list of the pre-defined macros Apple made available for iOS development.  I usually like starting an entry talking about why I was trying to solve a particular problem.  While I made a note to write up what I found, I did not note why I needed it at the time.  Assuming you are reading this because you need or might need such a thing, I’ll write on.

Some of the pre-defined macros are published in Apple’s documentation, but not all.  (Well, as far as I remember anyway.)  I feel the most confident that I didn’t miss one that could solve a problem when I get the list from the compiler itself.

While searching the internet I found instructions to use

gcc -arch i386 -dM -E - < /dev/null | sort

I changed ‘i386′ to ‘armv6′ and ‘armv7′ but that failed on my setup.  I don’t really know if I messed something up in the /Developer folder or if this line just generally won’t work for ARM.

The error message mentioned a missing file and after finding it, I changed the above command to this:

For Xcode 3.2.5:

/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/usr/bin/arm-apple-darwin10-gcc-4.2.1   -arch armv6 -dM -E - < /dev/null | sort
For Xcode 4.2.1
 /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/usr/bin/arm-apple-darwin10-llvm-gcc-4.2 -arch armv7 -dM -E - < /dev/null | sort
Change the “armv6″ to “armv7″ and vice-versa as needed.

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Fix to Symbolicate System Symbols in iOS 5.0.1 (9A405) Crash Logs

Mar 9

Posted by Walt Sellers in Debugging, iOS Development, iPhone & iPod Touch, Software Development, Tips, XCode-4 | No Comments

I found this one many weeks back and had it in my to-do list for the blog.  Now that 5.1 is out, I feel guilty I didn’t write it up sooner.  But then, my day job is keeping me very busy.

I had a long period where I could not fully symbolicate crash logs that were made by iOS 5.0.1 devices.  The symbols of my app would be symbolicated, but the system symbols of the device would not.  I was especially frustrated because a coworker with the exact same version of XCode could symbolicate those system symbols with no problem.  Neither of us knew why.

After a huge amount of searching with Google and reading items on StackOverflow.com,  I finally found a note saying the symbols in the iPhone 4S were corrupted somehow and they should be replaced with symbols from another device.  I don’t know if there was a problem with all the iPhone 4S devices, or just some of them or just early ones.

As much as I tried to do this,  I still could not symbolicate properly.  I triple-searched my computer for all copies of symbols for 5.0.1 (9A405) and removed them.  (You can compress them into .zip files if you want to keep them just in case.)

What I needed to know was to look in ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS DeviceSupport   Xcode 4.2 had been putting device symbol information in there.  Once I got rid of that folder, and attached a device, XCode pulled a new copy of the symbols and symbolication worked like a charm.

Top top it all off,  something about the symbolication script in XCode 4.2 works better than any of the previous symbolication scripts, either from Apple or from any developer site.  While symbolication inside XCode can be horribly slow, it does work pretty well.

Hope that helps

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