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XCode 4 – Stopping in the Debugger on NSAssert

Jul 10

Posted by Walt Sellers in Debugging, iOS Development, Regular Post, XCode-4 | 1 Comment

I’m not sure if XCode 4 makes this technique unnecessary. Since I originally wrote this, I’ve seen XCode 4.0.2 stop at NSAssert on its own, without me setting this breakpoint. But it may be helpful to someone somehow. So here it is:

Xcode 3: Run Menu -> “Manage Breakpoints”
XCode 4: Go to the breakpoint navigator.

Click the + button at the bottom of the navigator, select “Add Symbolic Breakpoint…” from the contextual menu that appears.

In the “Symbol” box, enter

-[NSAssertionHandler handleFailureInMethod:object:file:lineNumber:description:].

Then click “Done”. (NOTE: this is the default assertion handler. If you are using a custom assertion handler, you probably need to specify a symbol for its object and method.)


Now execution will break immediately on assertion failure. And very usefully, XCode shows the nearest source code of the stack, not the assembly of the assertion handler.

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Modal View appearing the wrong location?

Jun 19

Posted by Walt Sellers in iOS Development, Software Development | No Comments

Is calling presentModalViewController: while a keyboard is visible making your view appear in the wrong place on-screen?

Try sending the message to a different part of the view-controller hierarchy.

I had this problem recently and was getting ready to start hunting down the current first-responder when I lucked into a quicker answer:  change the receiver from the current view controller to the navigation controller. The navigation controller handles getting objects to resign first-repsonder status without any more code from me.

Getting the view dismissed when done is easy too.  Just send the dismiss message to the modal view’s navigationController.

Cheap Graphics Editing for iOS Apps: icons

Feb 6

Posted by Walt Sellers in iOS Development, Software Development, Tips, Tools-Graphics | No Comments

Rather than focus on totally free, this time I’m talking a paid, but totally worth the money application.

Art Text by BeLight Software is a cheap application that can give you the glossy, 3D icons and text you expect in an iPhone app with fairly little effort. (Apple Mac App Store link: id404180306)

There is no replacement for a graphic artist, but sometimes you need to make things yourself for practical reasons. And this little app can build some nice little icons that you can use (without embarrassment.)

I’m sorry that I don’t have much time to finish this post, so I’m resorting to some shorthand to list the things I like about this app for iPhone development:

  • You can make your graphics a specific size and fit things to that size.
  • It maintains layers and transparencies nicely.
  • Text and shapes can be filled with color, 3D effects, or images.
  • 3D effects can have multiple light sources. Light sources can be rotated in each item.
  • Shadows and strokes are easy.
  • Can save to PDF for full vector size changes.

Most of all,  with this little app, I can make an icon that looks decent in a few minutes.  If I tried the same thing in Photoshop or Pixelmator, I’d be working for hours to get the same look.

Free Graphics Editing for iOS Apps: Text

Feb 5

Posted by Walt Sellers in iOS Development, Regular Post, Software Development, Tools-Graphics | No Comments

How much of graphics need can I solve with the free apps that come with the Macintosh?  A challenge I had to take up recently when I did not have my trusty laptop and software.

There are of course free downloadable apps out there, but it should still be worthwhile to find a way.

I needed some text on a clear background.  If needed text on a colored background, it would be easy to make it in TextEdit and just take a screen shot.  An application that can do text and  can save as a PNG file can handle this, but what in the standard Mac apps will do it?  Preview. Apple’s free application for viewing images and PDF files. (Surprised? I was.)

Preview’s menus won’t just make a new file, except to paste what was copied into the clipboard. But you can make files of any size easily.  Just start with a bigger file and crop it down (or resize it).  Or, take a screen shot of something with the Mac’s screen capture and use that.  Command-shift-3 is good, but Command-Shift-4 will let you select any part of the monitor while showing you the resulting size.  It can be helpful to capture and image of the layout you want to put the text into. Then you can fit it right the first time.

If you don’t want to accidentally change your base file, make a copy of it in Finder first. Or use Preview’s “Save As” to set the new file and its location.

To get a clear background in Preview, select all or part of the image and hit the delete key.  Poof! Transparent background.

To get text into your file, start by showing the annotations toolbar. You can:

  • Click the “Annotate” button.
  • Use the menu View -> “Show Annotations Toolbar”
  • Use Tools -> Annotate -> “Add Text”

Drag out a text box and layout your text. You can’t set a shadow on the text, but you can do most other kinds of simple text editing.

CAUTION: when you save, all annotation item become images. Preview doesn’t really do layers even though it will keep separate items until you save (none of the formats saved layer information for me. If it does, please tell me.)

If you need layering in the originals to make changes easier, you’ll need a different program. For Preview, you can make new images by pasting original text from another source.

Opening the Inspector will tell you many things about your file. The right-most tab (pencil icon) will let you set colors and other attributes of the annotation items. There’s more, but perhaps that’s for another post.

Enjoy

XCode Problem “expected specifier-qualifier-list before “

Apr 27

Posted by Walt Sellers in iPhone & iPod Touch, Software Development | No Comments

Solution:  check that you included appropriate frameworks in your project and target.

I had this just now while building a new project and forgot to put the frameworks into the project.

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XCode Giving Incorrect Error Messages after Upgrade to 3.2.2

Apr 11

Posted by Walt Sellers in iPhone & iPod Touch, Software Development | No Comments

A few days ago,  I was helping upgrade a Mac’s XCode environment from 3.1.4.   After the upgrade, the first attempt to build and run a project resulted in strange errors.  ”Security Policy Violation”  came back from the device along with problems with the entitlements.

After much poking and prodding, I noticed that the Base SDK for the project was set to “iPhone OS 2.0 (missing)”.  The base SDK for the project was no longer available in XCode after the 3.2.2 upgrade.

Resetting the BaseSDK to 3.0 solved the issues and the build and run was fine.

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Amazon e-Book share to fall from 90% to 35%, Analyst Says

Mar 18

Posted by Walt Sellers in iPhone & iPod Touch, Software Development | No Comments

Thoughts started by Wall Street Journal’s blogger Matt Phillips’ article.

Always interesting to try and predict what the future holds… My opinion: eBooks will be BIG. Now why?(disclosure: I am an iPhone developer. I gave my science-teacher wife a Kindle for her birthday.)

Have we any reason to think that paper prices won’t keep increasing? Aren’t paper prices heavily influenced by energy prices, labor prices and plain old demand? (Retail price of 1 sheet of cheap copy paper is nearing 1 cent in my area.) Just the raw paper material and shipping it around will make it more expensive.

Isn’t much of the book industry basically an impulse-driven market? eBooks are fantastic for such a market. The trivial shipping costs of internet data may it easy to give away free sample chapters and give instant gratification to buyers. People who Read the rest of this entry »

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iPhone Ad-Hoc distribution problems

Nov 2

Posted by Walt Sellers in iPhone & iPod Touch, Software Development | No Comments

Well,  an interesting bit of problem-solving today.

I sent a revision of an app to a client with ad-hoc distribution.  It installed just fine on one device, but would not install on the other. (The one that was going to be used to demo the product.) I double-checked that both device IDs were properly included in the provisioning profile.

After some quick re-reading, I thought the (cryptic) error might be that I forgot to send the .mobileprovision file along with the app.  One of the instruction lists showed installing the profile manually.  But when the file was emailed and isntalled, iTunes asked if it should replace the existing provisioning profile. It probably came from the app (which has a embedded.mobileprovision file in it.)

iTunes doesn’t show any information about installed profiles (that I could find) so it wasn’t clear if the provisioning profile was actually on the device.  A quick download of the iPhone Configuration Utility cleared that up.  It showed information similar to  XCode’s organizer, including the provisioning profile.

As it turns out, you can’t just send a .zip of your app straight to a Windows computer like you can on the Mac.   I haven’t seen an explanation anywhere, but it might be that the bundle contains files or folders with names that are not Windows-friendly.  Both contain a symlink file, but they seem the same.

The solution it seems is to process the app bundle into an .ipa file.  The easiest way to do this is to drop the bundle on iTunes. It will process the bundle into an ipa file.  Just control-click on the app to pull up the contextual menu and choose “Show in Finder”.   (Or go find it in the iTunes folder.)  Send that ipa file to your ad-hoc Windows users and they can drop it into their iTunes.

The errors from the iPhone log:

unknown mobile_installationd[1347] <Error>: 00808a00 install_embedded_profile: Skipping the installation of the embedded profile
unknown mobile_installationd[1347] <Error>: unrecognized status -67068 from codesigning library
unknown mobile_installationd[1347] <Error>: 00808a00 verify_executable: Could not validate signature: e8008001
unknown mobile_installationd[1347] <Error>: 00808a00 preflight_application_install: Could not verify /var/tmp/install_staging.Pav7Nw/foo_extracted/Payload/appname.app/appname
unknown mobile_installationd[1347] <Error>: 00808a00 install_application: Could not preflight application install
unknown mobile_installation_proxy[1346] <Error>: handle_install: Installation failed
unknown mobile_installationd[1347] <Error>: 00808a00 handle_install: API failed
unknown mobile_installationd[1347] <Error>: 00808a00 send_message: failed to send mach message of 64 bytes: 10000003
unknown mobile_installationd[1347] <Error>: 00808a00 send_error: Could not send error response to client

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SQLite Missing Functions in iPhone 2.x

Sep 6

Posted by Walt Sellers in iPhone & iPod Touch, Software Development | No Comments

While trying to improve my app’s memory usage, I tried to add a call to SQLite’s routine to release memory cache: sqlite3_release_memory().   But when I tried to build it, I got the following error:

ErrorDot“_sqlite3_release_memory”, referenced from:
-[AppDelegate applicationDidReceiveMemoryWarning:] in AppDelegate.o
symbol(s) not found
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

Read the rest of this entry »

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Mysterious iPhone status bar icon?

Aug 21

Posted by Walt Sellers in iPhone & iPod Touch, Software Development | No Comments

Last night I was attending the iPhone SIG of the Florida Macintosh Users Group (FLMUG).

One of the members was asking about an icon in his status bar he couldn’t identify.  It looked like a landline telephone’s receiver with a keyboard underneath.  We scratched our heads for a minute until Phil said “wait, that’s gotta be the TTY setting”.  He quickly looked in Settings under “Phone” and yes, the TTY setting was on.  The icon went away when the setting was turned off.

Kudos to Phil for deducing the answer based on the “phone” and “keyboard” clues.

So today, I had to go lookup the other icons which may be displayed, just in case. :-)  They are listed by Apple as “status icons” here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1558

Walt

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