I know its a bit of a far fetched question.
But is it possible to import code from online, like say I had a .h and .m file on my website server and in the code I wanted to use it would I be able to import it? And How?
I ask this because it makes it loads easier to update an app if all they need to do is reload the app and the app changes to the latest version.
If you're talking about a Mac OS X application, then yes it's possible. No need to share your source code, just compile on the server and have the app download the new binary.
However, if your App needs to go through the App Store, which is necessary for iOS apps, then this surely is not possible. The only thing you can do is streamline the submission process as much as possible (see this question).
If you love the idea of being able to push new code at any time, consider making a web app. There's lots of stuff you can do these days.
I'm not 100% (maybe 95%) sure but I think storing objc code online to keep it auto-upgradable is not possible since the app isn't able to rebuild itself.
But if you want you could do a generic app that firstly fetches an XML/plist (for example) stored online to retrieve data and the app is set to read it and present different behaviours depending on that, but you'll have to code it previously in a generic way to support dynamic changes.
Hope this helps.
Related
I've got a big ask here, but I am hoping someone might be able to help me. If there's another site you think this should be posted on, please let me know.
I'm the developer of the free app Amphetamine for macOS and I'm hoping to add a new feature to the app - keeping a Mac awake while in closed-display (clamshell) mode while not having a keyboard/mouse/power adapter/display connected to the Mac. I get requests to add this feature on an almost daily basis.
I've been working on a solution (and it's mostly ready) which uses a non-App Store helper app that must be download and installed separately. I could still go with that solution, but I want to explore one more option before pushing the separate app solution out to the world.
An Amphetamine user tipped me off that another app, AntiSleep can keep a Mac awake while in closed-display mode, while not meeting Apple's requirements. I've tested this claim, and it's true. After doing a bit of digging into how AntiSleep might be accomplishing this, I've come up with 2 possible theories so far (though there may be more to it):
In addition to the standard power assertion types, it looks like AntiSleep is using (a) private framework(s) to apply non-standard power assertions. The following non-standard power assertion types are active when AntiSleep is keeping a Mac awake: DenySystemSleep, UserIsActive, RequiresDisplayAudio, & InternalPreventDisplaySleep. I haven't been able to find much information on these power assertion types beyond what appears in IOPMLibPrivate.h. I'm not familiar at all with using private frameworks, but I assume I could theoretically add the IOPMLibPrivate header file to a project and then create these power assertion types. I understand that would likely result in an App Store review rejection for Amphetamine, of course. What about non-App Store apps? Would Apple notarize an app using this? Beyond that, could someone help me confirm that the only way to apply these non-standard power assertions is to use a private framework?
I suspect that AntiSleep may also be creating a virtual keyboard and mouse. Certainly, the idea of creating a virtual keyboard and mouse to get around Apple's requirement of having a keyboard and mouse connected to the Mac when using closed-display mode is an intriguing idea. After doing some searching, I found foohid. However, I ran into all kinds of errors trying to add and use the foohid files in a test project. Would someone be willing to take a look at the foohid project and help me understand whether it is theoretically possible to include this functionality in an App Store compatible app? I'm not asking for code help with that (yet). I'd just like some help determining whether it might be possible to do.
Thank you in advance for taking a look.
Would Apple notarize an app using this?
I haven't seen any issues with notarising code that uses private APIs. Currently, Apple only seems to use notarisation for scanning for inclusion of known malware.
Would someone be willing to take a look at the foohid project and help me understand whether it is theoretically possible to include this functionality in an App Store compatible app?
Taking a quick glance at the code of that project, it's clear it implements a kernel extension (kext). Those are not allowed on the App Store.
However, since macOS 10.15 Catalina, there's a new way to write HID drivers, using DriverKit. The idea is that the APIs are very similar to the kernel APIs, although I suspect it'll be a rewrite of the kext as a DriverKit driver, rather than a simple port.
DriverKit drivers are permitted to be included in App Store apps.
I don't know if a DriverKit based HID driver will solve your specific power management issue.
If you go with a DriverKit solution, this will only work on 10.15+.
I suspect that AntiSleep may also be creating a virtual keyboard and mouse.
I haven't looked at AntiSleep, but I do know that in addition to writing an outright HID driver, it's possible to generate HID events using user space APIs such as IOHIDPostEvent(). I don't know if those are allowed on the App Store, but as far as I'm aware, IOKitLib is generally fine.
It's possible you might be able to implement your virtual input device using those.
I have a tweak with hooks to an app (tweak1)
The tweak is supposed to use a framework to execute some code.
Unfortunately within iOS7 I'm unable to do that.
However when the same code is executed in a separate tweak (tweak2) with hooks to springBoard, it runs just fine.
My question is possible for me to send a dictionary from the first tweak (tweak1) to tweak2 so it gets executed.
I think I need to use CPDistributedNotificationCenter. But not sure.
If that's the case, a helping suggestions or example would be greatly appreciated.
many thanks
CPDistributedNotificationCenter should work or you could just use NSDistributedNotificationCenter. It inherits from NSNotificationCenter, which we all know how to use.
Another solution I can suggest is CFMessagePort, which I'm using in my apps. I need to support iOS 4, which doesn't support NSDistributedNotificationCenter, so I ended up using CFMessagePort. It differs from notification model in that you can't send messages to everyone. You can only send messages between two known ports. But in your case it probably doesn't matter.
There is also the XPC API but I've never used it and can't say much about it. It's an IPC API so it should work. Many iOS components use it.
I want to develop an application for Mac OS X to record audio from one application.
I played around with Soundflower, but it only grabs the full system audio.
I know that I have to use a HAL plug-in. This plug-in is loaded from an application that uses Core Audio and then I can communicate with the plug-in to grab the audio.
My question is: How does such a plug-in look like? Are there examples on the internet? I have not found anything about this topic.
Now that you've decided that using Cocoa injection is a feasible solution to your problem, let's start there.
What you need to do is find out how the ObjC classes in the app are setting up to play audio, and hook in to set a different AU in place of the default system out.
There are two options (besides writing your own custom AU from scratch, which you don't need to do). You can use AUHAL as the AU, and capture the data from AUHAL. This is a bit easier from the point of view of hooking things up, but it means you have to write the code that renderers and saves the audio. Or you can just hook in a save-to-file AU, which is a bit harder to hook up, but once you do it takes care of rendering automatically.
So, how do you hook things in? Well, most of the higher-level CA calls are written to just write to the current output. If the app is doing things that way, you just need to hook in at startup to find your replacement AU and set it as the current output, in place of the default. On the other hand, if the app is writing directly to an AU that it stores in a variable, you have to hook it to store your AU as a variable. And if it's building a graph of AUs, you either replace the default output, or stick yours in front of it, in the graph.
See TN2091 for some sample code fragments for most of the hard parts for most of the possibilities. It doesn't show you how to put them together, and it's got a lot more about setting inputs than outputs (because that's harder), and the terminology can get confusing, but if you read it carefully, you should be able to find the parts you need.
If you haven't yet built a simple AU host and AU plugin before, you really should take the time to work through the whole Audio Unit Development Fundamentals guide. (And if you don't think you really need to know all that to do something simple, you're wrong. Why CoreAudio is Hard explains half of the reason; the changes between OS X versions versions are the other half of the reason.)
You probably also want to look at CocoaDev's CoreAudioAndAudioUnitsTutorial page for a placeholder page for a complete tutorial that nobody's ever written, with links to a lot of useful stuff.
Meanwhile, if injecting the whole MTCoreAudio framework into the app is feasible, it comes with a ton of nice, complete samples. In fact, even if you aren't going to use the framework, it's worth reading the Overview documentation, and possibly the source code.
The company I work for is building a managed force.com application as an integration with the service we provide.
We are having issues working concurrently on the same set of files due to the shoddy tooling that is provided with the force.com Eclipse plugin. If 2 developers are working on the same file, one is given a message that he can't save -- once he merges he has to manually force the plugin to push his changes to the server along with clicking 2 'Are you really sure' messages.
Basically, the tooling does a shoddy job of merging in changes and forces minutes of work every time the developer wants to save if another person has modified the file he's working on.
We're currently working around this by basically 'locking' individual files by letting co-workers know who is editing a file.
It feels like there has got to be a better way in this day and age. Does anyone know of a different toolset we could use, process we could change, or anything we can do to make this easier?
When working with the Force.com platform my current organisation has found a number of different approaches can work depending on the situation. We all use the Eclipse Force.com plugin without issues and have found the following set ups to work well.
We have a centralised version control system that we deploy from using a series of ant commands to a developer org instance. We then depending on the scope of the work either separate it off into chunks with each developer having their own development org and merging the changes and testing them regularly, or working in a single development org together (which if you have 2 developers should be no major problem) allowing you to have almost instant integration.
If you are both trying to work on the same file you should be pair programming anyway, but if working on two components of a similar system together, sharing the same org can allow you to develop in a fast and flexible manner by creating the skeleton of the system you wish to use and then individually fleshing out the detail.
I have used both methods extensively and a I say, work really well depending on the situation.
Each developer could work in separate development sandbox (if you have enterprise edition, I think 10 sandboxes with full config & limited amount of data are included in the fee?). From time to time you would merge your changes (diff tool from any version control system should be enough) and test them in integration environment. The chain development->integration->system test->Q&A-> production can be useful for other reasons too.
Separate trick to consider can be used if for example 2 guys work on the same trigger. I've learned it on the "DEV 401" course for Developers.
Move all your logic to classes. Seriously. They will be simpler to unit test too.
Add custom field (multi-select picklist) to User object. Values should be equal to each separate feature people are working on. It can hold up to 500 values so you should be safe.
For User account of developer 1 set "feature1" in the picklist. Set "feature2" for the other guy.
In the trigger write an if that tests presence of each picklist value and enters or leaves the call to relevant class. This wastes 1 query but you are sure that only the code you want will be called.
Each developer keeps on working in his own class file.
For integration test of both features simply set the multiselect to contain both features.
I found this trick especially useful when other guy's code turned out to be non-optimal and ate too many resources. I've just disabled his feature on my user account and kept on working.
This trick can be to some extend applied to Visualforce pages too (if you can divide them into components).
If you don't want to waste query - use some logic like "user's first name contains X" ;)
We had/have the exact same problem, we have a team of 10 Devs working on a force.com application that has loads of apex classes (>300) and VF pages (>300).
We started using Eclipse plugin but found it:
too slow working outside of the USA each time a save is called takes > 5 sections
to many merge issues with a team of 10 developers
Next we tried developing in our own individual sandboxes and then merging code. This is ok for a small project but when you have lots of files and need changes to be pushed between sandboxes it becomes impossible to manage as the only thing worse then force.com development tooling, is force.coms deployment/build tools. No automation its all manual. No easy way to move data between sandboxes either.
Our third approach was to just edit all our VF pages and Apex code in the browser. (not using their embedded editor that shows up in the bottom half of the page because that is buggy and slow) but just using the regular Editor under setup > develop > Apex classes. This worked ok. To supplement this we also had a scheduled job that would download all our code and save it into our SVN repository. We also built a tool that allow us to click a folder on our desktop and zip its contents and deploy it as static resources for us.
However this approach still has its short comings, i.e. it is slow and painful to develop in the cloud, their (salesforce) idea of Development As a Service is crazy. Also we have no real SCM we only have it acting as backups.
Bottom line is force.com is a CRM and not a Development platform, if you can? run, flee, get away from it as fast as you can. Using it for anything apart from a CRM is more trouble then it is worth. Even their Slogan "No Software" makes me laugh everytime
I'm not familiar with force.com, but couldn't you use source control and pull all the files down from force.com into your repository. Then you could all do your work, and merge your changes back into the mainline. Then whenever it's necessary push the mainline up to force.com?
Take a look at the "Development Lifecycle Guide: Enterprise Development on the Force.com Platform". You can find it on developer.force.com's documentation page.
You might want to consider working on separate static resources and pages and then just being careful when editing objects, classes etc.. If most of your development happens on client side code (page, staticresource, lightning component/app) you might be interested in this project: https://github.com/bvellacott/salesforce-build . In any case I strongly suggest using version control. If not on a server then at least locally on your machine, in case your peers overwrite your work.
Just say you have a quite large and complicated desktop application written in objective-c/cocoa written properly in MVC. You then wish to replace the V and C so that it is a web application?
Is there anything like Tomcat but for objective c? The closest thing I can think of is somehow convert the Model code into an apache module to load in apache?
Obviously I could embed some sort of HTTP server and write a whole pile of code to manage sessions and requests and responses and so on, but might there be a simpler way?
You can leave the server almost as-is. I'd run it as a daemon in the background.
I'd split the controller part. One part of it resides on the server as a connection between HTTP requests and the daemon.
You could run a self-made http server.
You could build it into a Apache module as you mentioned.
You could access your controller through CGI. This is the easiest option as I see it.
The second part of the controller is written in Javascript in the browser, exchanging data with the server and updating the GUI.
The view part is written completely in javascript.
You could - if you want - leave out the controller on the server and make the model understand HTTP requests.
For the Controller / View part consider using a framework.
jQuery for only a light interface. (Or a similar framework.)
I haven't yet found a framework that leaves all the model stuff to the server. Maybe you can use SproutCore or Cappuccino accordingly.
SproutCore, the full-backed MVC framework that is used by Apple. (Think so at least.)
Cappuccino, another full-backed MVC framework.
Have you looked at Cappuccino? http://cappuccino.org/
I have not used but have heard many good things about it.
There is a new web development platform for Objective-C/Cocoa called Bombax. It sounds like exactly what you're looking for (it is designed to allow you to write entire web applications in Objective-C). Perhaps you could even combine it with Cappuccino. You can check it out at http://www.bombaxtic.com.
The closest you'll probably come to Objective-C web frameworks are either SOPE, or GNUStep, neither of which I have used, but ran across when I was deciding if I wanted to use Rails or something written in Objective-C for my web stuff. There's also ARJDatabase, which is kind of like Core Data, but not source compatible.
The bottom line is, unless you were very careful about how you wrote your code (i.e. wrote it with GNUStep in mind, didn't use anything Apple specific) you're probably going to have to do quite a bit of work anyway. And if you used Core Data at all, there's no way I know of to reuse that outside of a Mac App. And since it's not setup to be used my multiple simultaneous users, you wouldn't want to use that in a web app anyway. Bottom line, I went with Rails.
There is Frothkit - http://code.google.com/p/frothkit/ but it appears not to have been updated for a year.