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21 February 2010
Posted in
Homegrown -
Philip Roy
Creating the "NZiPhone.com and NZMac.com News" app - Any software developer knows that things never go perfectly. Combine this with the fact that I was a newbie to the whole process, meant there were a lot of things to fix....from simple mistakes in naming conventions, to more complex issues. This article looks at those issues, highlights any basic faults that I may have caused and needed to resolve, as well as some things that were just about me being a bit fussy about the app and how the files all went together.
General fixes that I learned along the way
Xcode Tip # 1
If, when you build an app within Xcode to view it in the iPhone simulator, it doesn't look like changes have been applied, you might want to 'clean' the build first. This kicks out the cobwebs and then when you build the app, it truly reflects the latest version of your application. To do this, from the "Build" menu, select "Clean All Targets"...
...and then approve this action....
You should do this every time there are new TapLynx files released also as part of the updating process.
Fixes for Part 1
Application name length
As you would have noticed in the video, "NZiPhone.com" was too long for the application name, as you can see in this image...
From what I have read on the net, app names should generally be around 11 characters, although sometimes 12 is OK, but it depends on the width of the total title. So in this instance, I had to rename the app to "NZiPhone"...
Tidying things up because I'm fussy
Take a look at the following image that shows you the Xcode project and the actual folder on my Mac with all the files in it. Note where the graphics files I added to the project are displayed in Xcode, and also note that this is nowhere near the same as where they actually ended up within Xcode. This isn't an issue really....Xcode isn't a physical representation of where files are located on your Mac, but I found it a bit messy...
So I deleted the images within Xcode (but selected not to move them to the trash), then physically moved the files on my Mac into the "Resources" folder within my project, added the files back in the project in Xcode, but selected not to have Xcode move the files. It purely was for tidiness, but I like the less cluttered and structured look of my app folder now...
Oh, and I forgot in the video to add one more file...a 320x44 header graphic that I may use within the app, but you may have read about that already in Part 3.
Using a beta version of Xcode
One of the things I did when the iPad was announced, was join the iPhone developer program that costs $99 per year, so that I could get my hands on the beta. A week later, iPhone OS 3.1.3 came out and I updated my iPhone. Unfortunately, Xcode started freaking out as it didn't recognise 3.1.3 as a genuine version of the OS (the beta was now older than the OS on the phone....kind of) so I ended up having to install version 3.1.3 of the SDK to match my phone and set aside any notion of playing with the beta....not that I really could tell the difference.
And that's all my tips really. I expect once my app finally goes live that I'll discover loads of mistakes...but at the moment, the last thing I need to do is learn how to get this app running on my iPhone and submitted to Apple.
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