My project comprises a C++ core, iOS and Android wrappers (ObjC / Java) and a Python-wrapping-CMake build-system.
C++ works fine. However an Obj-C header file (with .h extension) marks syntax errors everywhere:
Does there exist some extension for handling this? I can't find one anywhere.
Xcode is a complex combination of different applications like interface builder, instruments, device manager and many more these were separate applications at a time so putting all this together in some other IDE wouldn't be easy task however there are few people those are trying something like AppCoda but still too far from the actual product.
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Is there an IDE which specifically supports Objective-C and has linked with Cocoa Touch (optionally Cocoa) build tools for easy writing, building and running of programs?
I am looking to switch from XCode because XCode is buggy and crashes when I load files which has thousands of lines of code. Also the beautifier isn't good. It's not that performant.
It doesn't need to come with Interface Builder. I just need to write Objective-C in the IDE. More like Aptana if you have been a web developer.
Jetbrains have AppCode http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/. it is an IntelliJ based alternative for Xcode but depends on an installed Xcode for IB and CoreData.
Only for writing Obj-C Code, you can use any text editor.
You can not draw any UI like IB, but you can code to construct any of the UI elements.
However I would suggest to use BBEdit.
Or if you wish you can go for any C / C++ / Java IDE. But it wont compile for compiling you need to to switch back to XCode.
Or you can compile through terminal by giving the following command.
xcodebuild -project "delta.xcodeproj" -target "delta" -configuration Release OBJROOT="/Users/anoop/desktop/delta" SYMROOT="/Users/anoop/desktop/delta"
I feel your pain but even if you find an IDE other than XCode you will find yourself coming back to XCode to do something anyway such as the Interface Builder, etc.
Also, unfortunately, AppCode also not perfect. There are scenarios it doesn't cover yet that might hinder you from migrating or cause you to do heavy hacks to get it to work.
However, I have a project with hundreds of files including source files and it works fine for me. I do admit that it crashes from time to time but there is nothing you can do about it. Maybe try refactoring your project to reduce the size of your source files. I did find having large text files can cause it to go bonkers. But it is a good practice anyway to have small class files. Maybe what you are describing is a code smell of bloated classes?
I'm not meaning to offend you or anything. It's just another perspective for you to look at. Use it or don't use it.
This question pops up quite often here, even if just implicitly when users mistag their iOS questions. So, what’s the difference between Xcode, Objective-C and Cocoa?
Objective-C is a programming language. It could be said that it’s just a description of what valid Objective-C programs look like and what they mean. If you have a source code listing written in Objective-C, you need an interpreter or a compiler to put the listing to work. Languages like Objective-C are usually compiled, so most people use a compiler (like LLVM). Objective-C is almost exclusively used to develop for iOS and OS X, but there are other uses, too – as an example, some people write Objective-C for Linux.
You can use a text editor to write the sources and a compiler to turn them into an actual programs, but with modern technologies there’s much more to take care of, so that there is another program to make your job easier. These are called Integrated Development Environments, or IDEs. An IDE offers you a convenient way to edit the sources, compile them, debug the resulting programs, read the documentation, and many other things. Xcode is one such IDE. An important observation here is that Xcode does not compile your sources itself, it just calls the standalone compiler (LLVM). And Xcode is not the only IDE you can use to develop Objective-C apps – there’s AppCode, for example.
Writing iOS or OS X apps from scratch each time would be very time-consuming. That’s why Apple provides the developers with a good set of libraries. The libraries are simply a huge amount of source code written by Apple, and this source code takes care of most things that apps have in common. These libraries are called Cocoa.
Now, if you can’t figure out how to extend a class, you are most probably talking about Objective-C. It doesn’t have anything to do with Xcode or Cocoa, you could be very well writing some GNUstep code for Linux using Vim as an IDE and GCC as a compiler. On the other hand, if your Xcode build process fails because of some mysterious setting, or if you’re trying to build a static library in Xcode, that’s clearly an Xcode issue. And if you can’t figure out how to use some NSObject facility or the NSFileManager class, that’s Cocoa. (But it doesn’t have to be Xcode-related, as you could use AppCode or TextMate as your IDE!)
Originally available on my blog. Feel free to link to the blog post or this question when retagging or explaining the difference.
Xcode is the integrated development environment (IDE)—the application—that developers use to write software for iOS and/or OS X. It includes the editor, the build system (determining what to build to produce the desired target), and quite a few other things.
Objective-C is the main language that developers write such software in. They may write bits of it in pure C, use C++ or combine it with Objective-C (producing Objective-C++), or write some or all of the program in another language entirely, such as MacRuby, Java (with j2objc), or C# (with MonoTouch).
Xcode includes the Clang compiler, which turns code written in Objective-C, C, and a few other languages into executable code. Most error messages come from Clang, and Xcode relies heavily on it for search indexing, syntax highlighting, and name completion of Objective-C code.
Cocoa and Cocoa Touch are application frameworks. Each one is a suite of many individual frameworks (libraries stored in folders named blahblah.framework), such as:
Foundation (both): General object-oriented utilities, including NSString, NSURL, NSFileManager, etc.
Core Foundation (both): Mostly the same thing, but different, mainly in having a C-based API rather than Objective-C
Application Kit (Mac): Application and windowing framework
UIKit (iOS): Application and windowing framework
Core Graphics (both): Drawing
Core Animation (both): Sprite-management and animation framework
(and many, many more where they came from, especially on the Mac)
So:
You can use a framework besides Cocoa or Cocoa Touch, but you'll have to have some Cocoa/Cocoa Touch code, at some level, in order for your application to talk to the system, receive events, draw, etc. Frameworks that specifically target Mac and/or iOS will include the relevant wrappers for you, at varying levels of quality.
You can use a language besides Objective-C, but you'll have lots of syntactic awkwardness, as most of Cocoa and Cocoa Touch are designed for Objective-C's unique syntactic features (particularly selectors).
You can use an editor besides Xcode, and you can even use a build system besides Xcode (such as make), but Apple's App Stores expect apps built a particular way (especially with regard to code signing), so unless you're not targeting the App Stores, any other build system has to replicate what Xcode does or risk its users getting rejections.
A clear mistake is failing to differentiate Xcode from everything else. Xcode is the tool you are using to program in - to edit code, run code, etc. So if you are having trouble with the tool (e.g., the window doesn't show you your code properly, or you're having trouble drawing your interface, etc.), that's an Xcode problem.
If you don't understand why your code doesn't work, you're probably having an Objective-C problem or a Cocoa problem. But you won't necessarily know which.
It's an Objective-C problem if the root of your trouble is that you don't know how the language works (e.g. you don't know what the asterisk is for, or that declaration is not instantiation, or that messages to nil do not error out but don't do anything either).
It's a Cocoa problem if you don't grasp the delegate architecture or how a view controller works.
But my experience of the way people pose questions is that you may be ignorant of which of these you are ignorant of. I don't mean you personally, I mean all of us. This can make it difficult to pose the question properly because you don't know what exactly it is that you don't know — if you did, you'd know it and you probably wouldn't be having a problem (you'd be fixing the problem and on to the next thing).
Are there frameworks/generators for producing iOS code from any other language?
A dynamic language like JavaScript, ruby or Python are preferred. Googling for iOS code generators was largely fruitless.
The problem with systems like PhoneGap is that their output is a full-fledged application. What I need to produce is a library (.a & .h file eventually) that other Objective-C developers can reuse in their projects.
RubyMotion may or may not do what you want. I haven't seen much about the practicalities of it yet, but I'm thinking since it's statically compiled chances are good that it can produce libraries that can be simply linked into Objective-C projects. One might need another tool to produce the header files.
Of course, this is all speculation.
I think the best solution for what you're looking for is Titanium. It has its own sdk (in JavaScript), a complete IDE and allows you to have one codebase for all major platforms (iOS, Android included). What it's really awesome is the fact that it actually generates native code (a valid XCode project or a Java one for Android). It's also free and open source. Definetely worth a look.
I've never seen code generators, but there are a variety of "spoofs" as it were.
http://xamarin.com/monotouch - iOS on C#
http://phonegap.com/ - iOS on HTML, CSS , Javascript
http://ipodtoucher55.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-to-create-iphone-apps-in-flash-cs5.html - one of several tutorials for flash on iOS
I've seen links to python libraries and I think java too.
When it comes down to it though, they're all work arounds, not direct development.
I want to create an iPhone/iPad applications using Corona SDK. But they should be compiled as 2 separate apps (for iPhone and iPad separate) - while keeping the same code base.
In Objective C I just created 2 separate targets for iPhone and iPad, defined a set of constants for both of them, added different images to each of the targets.
I would like to get the same behavior in Corona application. Is this possible? And how to do this?
I don't know of any built-in way to do it but it's fairly easy to create an IsTargetIPad() call and test against that in your code.
A slightly more advanced approach is to build a very primitive preprocessor where you run a script against your main files and set it to remove code blocks based on target. It adds the advantage of letting you put in all kinds of target-specific flags with no overhead. The process is simple: you code in one directory using special tokens that the preproc can catch and then to test/build you just run the preproc and have it copy the files out to two (or however many you want) folders dedicated to each target. You can do this with pretty much any basic scripting language.
I'm trying to create an iPhone app which plays local radio station in my district. I found this player to work best for me :
https://github.com/DigitalDJ/AudioStreamer
When testing it against my requirements it did the best without any doubt.
I thought I'll use this players API and it should be straightforward(not really for a newbie). How exactly I do that is where I'm stuck now. Because when I run the player original project it runs smooth, but when I copy code inside Classes to my app, this is what happens :
Ok, I've been developing some apps(test apps) for two weeks maybe and I lack experience.
How do you usually embed/import other projects code into your code and user the other codes api?
EDIT
So per Sunil Pandey answer, this cannot be run using IOS SDK version 5.0?
EDIT 2 :
I feel like I'm really close now, have this one issue :
Receiver 'AudioStreamer' for instance message is a forward declaration
It's declared in my h file. as AudioStreamer *streamer
As said Sunil Pandey, ARC mecanism is enabled for your project. With ARC, your project require at least iOS4 on the phone.
I would suggest you to disable ARC for the file you imported from the third party librairy. So you can keep using ARC in your own code (this mean, you never use retain, release, autorelease).
To disable ARC for each file of your AudioStreamer library, refer to How can I disable ARC for a single file in a project?
You must have implemented ARC inside your project. that's why it is giving you this error.
If you are using ARC then only way to use this project library is to create a static library of your AudioStreamer lib and then import it inside your app
Or
If you don't want to use ARC inside your app then you can turn it off by following method
select your target -> Build Setting -> Apple LLVM Compiler 3.0 - Language
set Objective c Automatic Reference Counting to NO