Re: Xcode 4 - project settings, etc
Re: Xcode 4 - project settings, etc
- Subject: Re: Xcode 4 - project settings, etc
- From: Quincey Morris <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2011 15:02:06 -0700
On Jun 14, 2011, at 14:14, Joanna Carter wrote:
> I have already written a few applications and am very familiar with the essentials of editing code and NIB files but now I am looking at writing a couple of frameworks and applications, mainly for OS X; can anyone direct me to the best place for information on how the various project settings affect things? Amongst other things, I was wondering about things like URIs for relating documents with applications, etc.
There's no good place for this information, if you expect documentation to be both current and correct.
The best place to start is the build setting help inside Xcode 4's Quick Help inspector. Supplement that with the Xcode 4 build settings document, which is actually an Xcode 3 build settings document. (The settings themselves are the same in both versions, since Xcode 4 didn't change the project format and works with Xcode 3 projects directly, but Xcode 4 handles builds differently and so it twists the meaning of some of the settings. In general, you'll want to follow the Xcode 3 conventions. However, some settings, such as PPC-related code-generation settings, are no longer relevant in Xcode 4, and there may be some new LLVM compiler settings that aren't documented anywhere outside Xcode 4 Quick Help.) In many cases, the best way to find out what settings to use is to create a new project from one of the latest project templates, and examine the build settings to see what's overridden in the template.
Getting good information about building frameworks is tricky. Originally, frameworks were (well, seem to me to have been) mostly intended as free-standing bundles that would be installed in public locations for the benefit of any application that wanted to use them, and embedding private frameworks in app bundles was an under-documented procedure. In practice, I believe the reverse situation now exists, because versioning of public frameworks is hard to get right. The most frequent current practice is to avoid versioning issues by embedding frameworks privately in each application bundle. Of course that's not universally true, but the documentation is oriented primarily towards public frameworks to be installed in Library/Frameworks. (The Frameworks Programming Guide was last updated in 2006.) Be especially careful googling about building frameworks, because much of what's out there is way out of date.
Relating document types with applications is another documentation mess, because it's a shifting target. You need to start with a good grasp of Mac OS X's UTI concepts, and then you need to realize that UTIs aren't stored attributes of files, but are deduced from file metadata (usually the extension, these days). You also need to understand that file types are not the same thing as document types, that UTIs for document types are somewhat of a hack (with pitfalls to watch out for), and that Xcode 4 introduced a new easy mechanism for creating the info.plist keys that define imported and exported UTIs which isn't documented at all yet but is straightforward enough to use if you know all the other information first.
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