Category Archives: Cocoa

NSDebugScrolling

Cocoa, Debugging, Hacking, OS X, Xcode

I’m working on some heavy NSTextView, NSScrollView, NSClipView type stuff in MarsEdit. This stuff is fraught with peril because of the intricate contract between the three classes to get everything in a text view, including its margins, scrolling offset, scroll bars, etc., all working and looking just right.

When faced with a problem I can’t solve by reading the documentation or Googling, I often find myself digging in at times, scratching my head, to Apple’s internal AppKit methods, to try to determine what I’m doing wrong. Or, just to learn with some certainty whether a specific method really does what I think the documentation says it does. Yeah, I’m weird like this.

I was cruising through -[NSClipView scrollToPoint:] today and I came across an enticing little test (actually in the internal _immediateScrollToPoint: support method):

0x7fff82d1e246 <+246>:  callq  0x7fff82d20562            ; _NSDebugScrolling

0x7fff82d1e24b <+251>:  testb  %al, %al

0x7fff82d1e24d <+253>:  je     0x7fff82d20130            ; <+8160>

0x7fff82d1e253 <+259>:  movq   -0x468(%rbp), %rdi

0x7fff82d1e25a <+266>:  callq  0x7fff8361635e            ; symbol stub for: NSStringFromSelector

0x7fff82d1e25f <+271>:  movq   %rax, %rcx

0x7fff82d1e262 <+274>:  xorl   %ebx, %ebx

0x7fff82d1e264 <+276>:  leaq   -0x118d54fb(%rip), %rdi   ; @“Exiting %@ scrollHoriz == scrollVert == 0”

0x7fff82d1e26b <+283>:  xorl   %eax, %eax

0x7fff82d1e26d <+285>:  movq   %rcx, %rsi

0x7fff82d1e270 <+288>:  callq  0x7fff83616274            ; symbol stub for: NSLog

 

Hey, _NSDebugScrolling? That sounds like something I could use right about now. It looks like AppKit is prepared to spit out some number of logging messages to benefit debugging this stuff, under some circumstances. So how do I get in on the party? Let’s step into _NSDebugScrolling:

AppKit`_NSDebugScrolling:

0x7fff82d20562 <+0>:   pushq  %rbp

0x7fff82d20563 <+1>:   movq   %rsp, %rbp

0x7fff82d20566 <+4>:   pushq  %r14

0x7fff82d20568 <+6>:   pushq  %rbx

0x7fff82d20569 <+7>:   movq   -0x11677e80(%rip), %rax   ; _NSDebugScrolling.cachedValue

0x7fff82d20570 <+14>:  cmpq   $-0x2, %rax

0x7fff82d20574 <+18>:  jne    0x7fff82d20615            ; <+179>

0x7fff82d2057a <+24>:  movq   -0x116a7ad9(%rip), %rdi   ; (void *)0x00007fff751a9b78: NSUserDefaults

0x7fff82d20581 <+31>:  movq   -0x116d5df8(%rip), %rsi   ; “standardUserDefaults”

0x7fff82d20588 <+38>:  movq   -0x1192263f(%rip), %rbx   ; (void *)0x00007fff882ed4c0: objc_msgSend

0x7fff82d2058f <+45>:  callq  *%rbx

0x7fff82d20591 <+47>:  movq   -0x116d5fa0(%rip), %rsi   ; “objectForKey:”

0x7fff82d20598 <+54>:  leaq   -0x118ab0cf(%rip), %rdx   ; @“NSDebugScrolling”

0x7fff82d2059f <+61>:  movq   %rax, %rdi

0x7fff82d205a2 <+64>:  callq  *%rbx

 

Aha! So all i have to do is set NSDebugScrolling to YES in my app’s preferences, and re-launch to get the benefit of this surely amazing mechanism. Open the Scheme Editor for the active scheme, and add the user defaults key to the arguments passed on launch:

Screenshot 3 29 16 3 50 PM

You can see a few other options in there that I sometimes run with. But unlike those, NSDebugScrolling appears to be undocumented. Googling for it yields only one result, where it’s mentioned offhand in a Macworld user forum as something “you could try.”

I re-launched my app, excited to see the plethora of debugging information that would stream across my console, undoubtedly providing the clues to solve whatever vexing little problem led me to stepping through AppKit assembly code in the first place. The results after running and scrolling the content in my app?

Exiting _immediateScrollToPoint: without attempting scroll copy ([self _isPixelAlignedInWindow]=1)

I was a little underwhelmed. To be fair, that might be interesting, if I had any idea what it meant. Given that I’m on a Retina-based Mac, it might indicate that a scrollToPoint: was attempted that would have amounted to a no-op because it was only scrolling, say, one pixel, on a display where scrolling must move by two pixels or more in order to be visible. I’m hoping it’s nothing to worry about.

But what else can I epect to be notified about by this flag? Judging from the assembly language at the top of this post, the way Apple imposes these messages in their code seems to be based on a compile-time macro that expands to always call that internal _NSDebugScrolling method, and then NSLog if it returns true. Based on the assumption that they use the same or similar macro everywhere these debugging logs are injected, I can resort to binary analysis from the Terminal:

cd /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework
otool -tvV AppKit | grep -C 20 _NSDebugScrolling

This dumps the disssembly of the AppKit framework binary, greps for _NSDebugScrolling, and asks that 20 lines of context before and after every match be provided. This gives me a pretty concise little summary of all the calls to _NSDebugScrolling in AppKit. It’s pretty darned concise. In all there are only 7 calls to _NSDebugScrolling, and given the context, you can see the types of NSLog strings would be printed in each case. None of it seems particularly suitable to the type of debugging I’m doing at the moment. It’s more like plumbing feedback from within the framework that would probably mainly be interesting from an internal implementor’s point of view. Which probably explain why this debugging key is not publicized, and is only available to folks who go sticking their nose in assembly code where it doesn’t belong.

A Eulogy For Objective-C

Cocoa, Links, OS X

I missed Aaron Hillegass’s talk at AltConf earlier this year, but was nudged to take a look at the transcript by Caro’s tweet today linking to the talk’s video page on Realm.

Although I’m 100% sure, based on experience, that Aaron’s talk is a pure delight to watch, I also appreciate that I could jump right in and read a transcript of the talk until I get a chance to watch it. Aaron gives a thought-provoking “eulogy” for Objective-C, in which he celebrates its parentage and its life thus far.

When a guy like Aaron Hillegass gives a history of Objective-C, and speaks to its strengths and weaknesses, you should hang on every word. He covers many of the features that distinguish the language, provides a context for when they were added, and gives examples of key technologies that are enabled by them. He is also aware of the tradeoffs some of these features demand:

Loose typing made a lot of things that were difficult in other languages much easier, or possible. It also made bugs that didn’t exist in other languages possible as well. And you embrace that as an Objective-C programmer. You’re like, “This is a language for smart, pedantic, uptight people, I’m going to be very careful and do the right thing when I’m typing in names.“

I love his hypothetical quote, and think it condenses the feeling a lot of us long-time Objective-C programmers have about the language. We welcome Swift in many respects, but it’s hard to let go of a language whose idiosyncrasies we’ve grown to love, hate, and ultimately make peace with.

Brent’s Feedback

Cocoa, Xcode

I love Brent Simmons’s style of responding to my last post, in which I described a cover class for NSURLSession that makes is easier for me to adopt it gradually throughout my source base. Brent:

This is the right way to do it. The callers – including the unit tests – don’t have to know anything about the implementation, since the interface is the same. That’s just good programming.

That’s just good etiquette. When responding to somebody with whom you have a fundamental difference of opinion, lead with a compliment. Brent goes on to say:

It’s also not how I would do it in this specific case.

Brent argues that cover classes have their place when it comes to adapting APIs that are not native to the frameworks or language being developed in. But when there is no impedance mismatch, he says:

I’d rather just use a thing directly, rather than write a class that wraps a built-in class.

All good food for thought. I will add here that in the particular case of my “RSLegacyHTTPRequest” class, I decided to make it a subclass of the working title for my previously mentioned “RSSpiffyRequest,” which is the much less glamorous “RSHTTPSession.” RSHTTPSession is a subclass of NSObject, and happens to own a subsystem of objects that “don’t matter to you” but deeply involve NSURLSession. In fact, interacting with RSHTTPSession will feel a lot like interacting with NSURLSession.

The idea, longer term, is that clients of RSLegacyHTTPRequest will move away from that antiquated interface and towards RSHTTPSession. The argument for subclassing in this case is I like the pattern when it allows me to gradually move good logic upwards, from an antique class to a modern class. Is it awkward that it’s called RSHTTPSession, instead of RSHTTPSessionManager? Maybe. I’ll change it if things get weird.

So I’m doing things my way, adapting an antique class to the future by providing a cover class that translates an old-and-busted interface to NSURLSession, and doing things Brent’s way, by basing the future of my “spiffy” NSURLSession convenience classes on a base class that inherits from NSObject, provides a stable interface, but fully embraces and exposes the NSURLSession philosophy to its clients.

Burn After Releasing

Cocoa, Mac, Xcode

I am pretty diligent about following up on crash reports, probably because when it comes down to it, chasing crashes is one of the funner aspects of software development to me. Sure, when I’m hours into a frustrating problem and can’t make heads or tails of why something’s blowing up, it’s exhausting, and I wish to hell I could simply find the solution, but upon finally unwinding the riddle of a failure, it’s all those hours of toil that pay back dividends as the thrill of success.

Recently I had an odd MarsEdit crash report come in with a brief but ultimately very meaningful comment attached to it:

“I just updated a post with a PDF embedded from OneDrive.”

I love it when customers take the time to write something about the circumstances surrounding a crash. Often even a little clue can be enough to lead to the unique series of steps that will ultimately reproduce the problem. In this case though, I was confused. I know OneDrive is Microsoft’s cloud storage solution, but is the customer uploading a PDF from their mounted OneDrive, or … ?

Luckily the customer in this case also left an email address, so I got in touch and, after a few rounds of zeroing in on the meaning of the expression “embedded from OneDrive,” I learned that the issue was specifically to do with pasted HTML source code that Microsoft offers to customers who wish to literally embed a OneDrive document into another web page.

So I created a OneDrive account, added a PDF document to my storage, copied the “embed code” for the item, and pasted it into a new MarsEdit post. To my great surprise and satisfaction, when I pressed Send and published the post to my blog, MarsEdit crashed with exactly the same stack trace as the customer had submitted.

Well, I’ll be darned.

Pointing The Finger

The stack trace in this case was pretty cryptic, and implied that a private Apple class, NSURLConnectionInternal, was crashing while trying to message what I could only assume was its delegate. Here’s the gist of the very tip of the crashing thread’s trace:

Thread 0 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0  libobjc.A.dylib	objc_release
1  libobjc.A.dylib	AutoreleasePoolPage::pop(void*)
2  com.apple.CFNetwork  -[NSURLConnectionInternal _withConnectionAndDelegate:onlyActive:]
3  com.apple.CFNetwork	-[NSURLConnectionInternal _withActiveConnectionAndDelegate:]

Usually, when you see something like this where a thread is crashing while trying to release an object, the first thing to suspect is that you’ve screwed something up. Probably by over-releasing some object or neglecting to nil-out a delegate attribute when one of your objects is destroyed. But in the case of logs like this where the crash occurs with a backtrace that is separate from your own code’s control (it’s a run loop callback to Apple’s own networking code), it can be hard to trace it back to specific code in your app. In this case, I can tell by the NSURL clues that a network request is probably being serviced, but which one? And which object was its delegate? Luckily, the clue about OneDrive had led me to a working test case, so I could dig into this question with more care.

The first step I like to take is to hopefully separate the crashing issue from my own app’s code, by creating a stripped-down test app that exhibits the problem. If I couldn’t achieve that, then the bug probably did rest somewhere in MarsEdit, and if I could create such a test case, then the problem of poking at it to deduce what is going wrong is made much simpler.

I created a new document based application whose document windows possess a single WebView. When a new document is created, the document does one thing: load one of those OneDrive embedded documents as the HTML content of the view. Armed with this test app, I was able to create new WebView instanced with the presumably problematic HTML code, and observe the behavior of each WebView in isolation from other junk that might have been going on in a more complex app such as MarsEdit.

The only problem was that my test app didn’t seem to exhibit any problems. I could load 10, 20 WebViews with the OneDrive embed code in it, and they all ran like butter. Damn it, there was no bug here! Until, that is, I deigned to close one of those windows. Blam! The test app crashes, yielding an identical stack trace to the one provided by my customer and reproduced in MarsEdit.

It started to make sense: when you publish a post from MarsEdit, the default setting is to also then close the window associated with that post. The reason the customer experienced the crash after sending the post to their blog was only because that happened to correlate with MarsEdit subsequently closing the window, and thus destroying the WebView that had held the OneDrive embed content.

Whose Zombie Is This?

Armed with a simple test case that reproduces the bug at will, the first thing I did was to enable Apple’s built-in facility for debugging so-called “zombie” objects. These are perfectly named because they are objects that have been deallocated but which some code within your app treats as though they were still alive. When you message a zombie object, the behavior is unpredictable because all the data that had been associated with the object is now correlated with whatever other use the system has found for that area of memory. Xcode has a convenient checkbox that makes it easy to turn on zombie detection. Just open the scheme editor and look for the Diagnostics tab under the Run configuration:

Screenshot 11 6 14 5 25 PM

This option instructs the Objective-C runtime to abstain from completely deallocating objects. In doing so, it transforms deallocated objects into a special kind of placeholder object that can detect when it has been messaged, and scream to high hell about it. When I run with zombie objects enabled, and reproduce the crash, I also see this message in the console log:

*** -[WebView release]: message sent to deallocated instance 0x6080001273a0

Ah ha! So the object in question, the one being delegated to by NSURLConnection, is probably the instance of the WebView itself. But, I don’t set a WebView as a delegate of any NSURLConnection, and certainly this simplified test case doesn’t. So it must be WebKit itself that is setting itself as an NSURLConnection’s delegate. Not my problem, I can file the bug and move on … or can I?

Going The Extra Mile

This is where the open-sourced nature of WebKit is both a blessing and a curse. If this issue had been revealed to exist somewhere deep within AppKit, or any of Apple’s other closed-source frameworks, I most certainly would have thrown up my arms, filed a bug, and hoped for the best. But Apple’s WebKit framework is something I can download, build, and debug. Sure, it takes nearly all day to build, and there is a steep learning curve to debugging it, but why did I become a software developer if I’m not up for a challenge?

Since I knew that the issue at its core appeared to be the over-release of an object, specifically of the WebView, I moved up from the basic utility of zombie objects to the high-octane “Zombies” flavored analysis configuration of Apple’s Instruments tool. Like the runtime flag we set earlier in Xcode, this makes it easy to detect attempts to message zombie objects, but it also goes a step further by correlating that knowledge with a recorded history of a given object, and all the memory-management related manipulations of that object.

Simpler

The tail end of a very long table shows the running retain count for an object, in this case the WebView itself, as well information about which library, method, or function was responsible for the call that affected the object’s memory management status.

To make a long, long, long, long, story very short: I used Instruments and its “pairing” functionality, which lets you hide balanced pairs of retain/release calls so that you are left with a more manageable subset of calls to examine and scrutinize. After scratching my head over this for hours and not making much headway, I finally came upon a specific call stack that had a very suspicious heritage. I confirmed through Instruments and then by direct examination of WebKit source code, that the WebView instance in question was in fact retaining and then autoreleasing itself as part of its dealloc method.

In this era of ARC, some of you may not be so intricately familiar with Cocoa memory management to see at a glance why that’s a very bad thing. Here it is a nutshell:

  1. By the time an object’s dealloc method is done running, the object is gone. I mean, literally gone, or else being managed as a zombie object for debugging purposes.
  2. An object can be retained and released as much as you like, but if you’re already in the midst of dealloc’ing the object, it won’t make a bit of difference.
  3. Autoreleasing an object postpones release until a later time, when the active autorelease pool is released.
  4. Thus, autoreleasing an object in the midst of being dealloc’d guarantees that it will later be sent a release message. Oops, that would be bad. It could even cause a crash like the one we’re seeing…

How in the heck does WebView manage to autorelease itself as a consequence of dealloc’ing itself? And what unique relationship does that possibility have to the embedding of Microsoft OneDrive documents? I’ll try to be as brief as possible:

Microsoft’s OneDrive support installs JavaScript callbacks that run on a periodic basis, constantly fetching data from Microsoft’s servers via xmlHTTPRequest. The calls are made with such frequency that, especially while an embedded document is in the process of loading, there’s a good chance that closing a WebView and dealloc’ing it will catch Microsoft at a time when it thinks sending such a request is a good idea. The process of cleaning up the WebView has a side-effect of cleaning up the JavaScript runtime environment, and callbacks such as Microsoft’s might get one last chance to send a network request.

Sending the request would be fine, except for WebView’s own conscientious behavior which takes care to retain and autorelease itself whenever a new batch of network requests is made on its behalf. This guarantees that the WebView won’t disappear while an open request is running. But of course, it can’t make that guarantee when the WebView is in the process of being destroyed.

Short story shorter: WebView inadvertently adds itself to the autorelease pool when it’s on the verge of being destroyed, and subsequent release of that autorelease pool causes a zombie message to be sent to the deallocated instance.

I reported the bug, and submitted a patch to the WebKit team. My proposed fix works around the problem by wrapping the bulk of WebView’s -dealloc method with a separate autorelease pool, such that any inadvertent autoreleasing of the WebView will be tidied up before the object is literally destroyed. Because WebKit is open source, I was able to make the change, build and test it, and confirm that the crashes disappear both in my test app and in MarsEdit.

I would like to thank Alexey Proskuryakov for taking the time to help dig into the issue in parallel with me. He was on to the nut of the problem long before I was, but I glossed over some key hints in his analysis. He also helped in guiding me through the steps of submitting a proper patch with my bug report.

In The Mean Time

Hopefully Apple will accept my patch, or come up with a smarter way of fixing the problem for a future update to WebKit. In the mean time, I want my app to be as reliable as possible for the widest variety of users as possible. Yes, that even means Microsoft OneDrive users. How can I work around the problem today?

The simplest solution, requiring neither subclassing of WebView, swizzling, or anything like that, is simply to take care before releasing a WebView in your app, to manually call -[WebView close] on it first. This takes care of all the complicated business that runs the risk of autoreleasing the WebView, such that when WebView’s own dealloc method is reached, it won’t have any such complexities to expose itself to.

Tracking down and fixing this bug has been an incredibly tiresome yet rewarding experience. I hope you have learned a thing or two from the approach I took here, and that I have inspired you to take crash reports with the seriousness they deserve. Your customers will thank you for it, and you might even get a kick out of occasionally coming out on top!

Yosemite’s Dark Mode

Apple, Cocoa, Mac

If you’re a Mac developer you’re no doubt feeling that restlessness that comes when a major new OS release is nigh. Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite has been cycling through “GM Candidate” releases for the past couple weeks, and many people seem to think it’s likely to be released to the public later this month.

One of the big user-facing visual changes is an optional “dark mode,” accessible from the General tab of System Preferences. When a user ticks this on, high level UI elements such as the menu bar and dock adopt a different style of drawing which you can roughly characterize as being white-on-black instead of the default black-on-white Mac appearance.

One hiccup for developers of third party apps is if you have an NSStatusItem or other custom menu bar item with a custom icon, you probably designed it so that it looks good on the white or light default menu bar.

Unfortunately, Apple has not provided a sanctioned method for detecting whether the user has switched to “dark mode,” so it’s non-trivial to tune your art to suit each of the modes at runtime. Instead, Apple recommends that all such icons should be designed such that Apple can effectively color them as appropriate for the current mode.

Luckily it’s pretty easy to get this behavior for custom status bar icons. You probably already call -[NSStatusItem setIcon:yourImage] with your custom image. Now, just make sure to call -[yourImage setTemplate:YES], and you’re done. The only caveat I would add here is that Mac OS X 10.9 and earlier do not seem to respect the “template” attribute when drawing status items, so I think the safest bet is to check for 10.10 at runtime, and omit the call to setTemplate if you’re running any earlier system:

BOOL oldBusted = (floor(NSAppKitVersionNumber) <= NSAppKitVersionNumber10_9)
if (!oldBusted)
{
	// 10.10 or higher, so setTemplate: is safe
	[myIcon setTemplate:YES]
}

Now your status item icon looks great on 10.10, where in fact its coloring may even be slightly altered in light mode, and in 10.9, where it looks, well, like it always did. Update: thanks to Rick Fillion and Will Cosgrove for explaining that my problems on 10.9 are probably because my image is not designed right for use as a template. I’ll leave the solution to that as an exercise for the writer.

Unfortunately, this promise does not hold true for regular NSMenuItem items that are installed at the highest level in the menu bar. These are relatively uncommon, but for example you might find some apps with a gear icon, a script icon, or other similar graphic in lieu of a text-based menu title. When an icon is supplied to such a menu item, the template nature is not meaningfully respected in dark mode, so the icon draws more or less as-is, and is likely to almost disappear because of the lack of contrast. If you happen to be running 10.10 you can witness this problem by running iTunes and seeing that at least one script is in ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts. Its script menu icon appears right next to the “Help” menu.

I reported the issue to Apple and it came back as a duplicate. As of the latest 10.10 GM candidate, it has not been fixed, but I got a reassuring tweet from Apple’s own Eric Schlegel today:

So in summary, if you use icons as the “titles” of menus either inside or outside of the status bar area of the menu bar, be sure to call setTemplate:YES on it when running on 10.10. If you happen to have a menu bar icon affected by the bug I reported, I recommend creating a test project that installs an NSStatusItem with the same icon, so you can get a sense for how it’s going to look in dark mode when its template nature is suitably handled.

F-Script Anywhere With LLDB

Automation, Cocoa, iOS, Xcode

Ever since the start of my career at Apple, working with the venerable Macsbug, I have prided myself on making the most of whatever debugging facilities are at my disposal. I came to be quite capable with Macsbug, adding custom commands and data templates that helped me speed through crucial debugging sessions that would have otherwise taken much longer.

When I moved from the classic Mac OS team to Mac OS X, I was forced, only slightly earlier than every other Mac developer, to adapt to gdb. I did so with modest aplomb, adding custom commands that made it easy to, for example, continue until the next branch instruction (as it happens, also the first real post on the Red Sweater Blog).

When Apple started shifting away from gdb to lldb a few years ago, I realized I would have to throw out all my old tricks and start building new ones. To my great shame, progress on this front has been slower than I wished. The shame is made greater by the fact that lldb is so delightfully extensible, it practically begs for a nerd like me to go town adding every manner of finessing to suit my needs.

The nut of lldb’s extensibility is that much of its functionality is actually implemented in Python, and developers such as ourselves are invited to extend that functionality by providing Python modules of our own.

I finally decided to break the ice with lldb’s extensibility by adding a shortcut command for something I often want to do, but frequently put off because it’s too cumbersome: injecting F-Script into an arbitrary application running on my Mac. F-Script is a novel dynamic programming interface that lets you query the runtime of a Cocoa app using a custom language. It also features a handy tool for drilling down into an app’s view hierarchy and then navigating the various superviews and subviews, along with all their attributes. In some respects it’s very similar to a “web inspector,” only for native Objective-C applications on the Mac (and sadly, with far fewer features).

There are Automator workflows that aim to automate the process of injecting F-Script into a target app, by running the required commands, via gdb or lldb, to make the injection work seamlessly. For some reason, these workflows have never worked so seamlessly for me, so I’m always reduced to attaching to the process with lldb, and running the required commands manually to get the framework loaded.

Fortunately for me, “having to run lldb” is not such a big deal. Usually when I want to poke around at an app, I’m in lldb anyway, trying to break on a specific function or method, or examining the application’s windows and views via the command line. Once I’m attached to a process with lldb, getting F-Script to inject itself is as easy as running these two commands:

expr (void) [[NSBundle bundleWithPath:@"/Library/Frameworks/FScript.framework"] load]
expr (void) [FScriptMenuItem insertInMainMenu]

That’s all well and good but to do that I always have to find the memo I took with the specific commands, then copy and paste them individually into lldb. Far too often, I wind up imagining the struggle of this work and put it off until I’ve spent minutes if not hours doing things “the harder way” until I finally relent and load F-Script.

Today I decided that I need to stop manually copying and pasting these commands, and I need to finally learn the slightest bit about lldb’s Python-based script commands. The fruit of this effort is summarized in this GitHub gist. Follow the directions on that link, and you’ll be no further away than typing “fsa” in lldb from having all of its utility instantly injected into the attached app from lldb.

Even if you’re not interested in F-Script Anywhere, the gist is a concise example of what it takes to install a simple, Python-backed macro command into lldb. Enjoy!

Brent’s Coding Nits

Cocoa, iOS, Mac

I agree with every one of Brent Simmons’s coding nits, even if I don’t practice what he preaches completely. Everybody has to make some mistakes to keep life interesting, right?

There’s also one point he makes:

All of your class names should have a prefix. All of them.

Which I think is particularly applicable to shared code such as the kind he’s reviewing on GitHub when compiling this list of nits. It’s not nearly so important, and in fact not really that important at all, for a project’s private classes to have prefixes. For example if you make a new app called “Motorcycle Derby,” you should be forgiven for calling your app’s delegate class “AppDelegate.m” if that is what suits you. By this point in history, Apple takes virtual namespacing seriously enough that you’re unlikely to clash with an unprefixed name from them, and so long as everybody distributing shared library code follow’s Brent’s rule above, you won’t clash with them either.

Still, you can’t go wrong by adding prefixes to be extra sure that you won’t conflict with anybody.

Timestamp Disservice

Cocoa, Xcode

Any developer who has worked on apps for Apple’s Mac or iOS platforms has undoubtedly run up against confounding issues with code signing. Some issue may be rooted in the behavior of the codesign tool itself, while others have to do with Xcode’s valiant but sometimes confounding attempt to mask all the complexity of code signing in its build settings. On top of that, there are myriad ways in which one can introduce subtle abnormalities over time, by allowing certificates and private keys to outstay their welcome in one’s keychain, or by neglecting to transfer them to another machine which will now be used for development.

When code signing works, it just works. And when it doesn’t? I hope you didn’t have anything planned for the rest of the week.

One vexing issue arises when Apple’s “timestamp service” is not available for whatever reason. Perhaps you’re hacking on an airplane without internet access, or as is commonly the case, Apple’s servers are taking an unplanned siesta. I’m sure you’ll recognize the problem by the tell-tale error that appears in Xcode, just before you would otherwise expect a build to succeed:

% codesign MyApp.app
MyApp.app: The timestamp service is not available.

The purpose of the timestamp server is to provide authenticated timestamps to the codesign tool, so that it can embed along with its code signature a future-proof confirmation of the date the code was signed. What purpose could this serve? For example, if a piece of software was found to have a critical bug that compromised the security of users, but was fixed as of January 1, 2014, Apple and other consumers of the code could consider the timestamp of that vendor’s code while evaluating how much to trust it. In practice, I don’t think code signature timestamps are being put to much use on Mac OS X, but I can see the reasoning for them and they seem like a pretty good idea. I don’t mind supporting them as long as it isn’t too much of a hassle. (Update: See the comment below from Václav SlavÁ­k about the more fundamental purpose of timestamps tying a code signature’s date to the era of the certificate that was used to sign it).

In the event that the timestamp server cannot be reached for whatever reason, codesign simply fails. This is probably a good idea, because if it’s important for signed code to also contain a timestamp, you wouldn’t want to accidentally ship a major release of your app without it. But because the timestamp server can be unavailable for a variety of reasons, some of them common, we need some simple solution for continuing with the the day-to-day building of our apps without ever being bothered by the pesky timestamp service issue.

Lucky for us, such a solution exists in the form of a codesign command-line flag: “–timestamp”. Ordinarily this flag is used to specify the URL of a timestamp server, if you choose to use one other than the Apple default. But a special value none indicates that timestamping of the signed code should be disabled altogether. Let’s see, when could we care less about the timestamping of code? For example, when we’re on an airplane or iterating on debugging builds in Xcode, in the privacy of our own offices and homes.

In short, save yourself a lot of headaches by configuring your projects such that code signing does not consult the timestamp server unless you are building a release build. You can add the option directly to the “Other Code-Signing Flags” section of your build settings, configured to only affect Debug builds. In my case, I employ a variety of cascading Xcode configuration files, upon which all of my projects and targets are based. By changing the value in the configuration file, I’m assured that all my apps will be helped with one fell swoop. This comes straight out of my “RS-Project-Debug.xcconfig” file:

// For Debug builds, we don't require timestamping because
// Apple's server may be down or we may be off-network
OTHER_CODE_SIGN_FLAGS = --timestamp=none

Now any build configuration that inherits the configuration will default to not consulting the timestamp server. My Debug build configurations inherit this setting, my Release builds do not. There is always the small chance that a Release build will be caught up by a misbehaving Apple timestamp server, but whenever I’m hacking on an airplane or iterating on debug builds in my office, code signing occurs without any risk of being stopped by this pesky error.

Transplanting Constraints

Cocoa, iOS, Workflow, Xcode

Over the past few months I have become quite taken by Auto Layout, Apple’s powerful layout specification framework for Mac and iOS.

For the past few years I’ve heard both that Auto Layout is brilliant and that it has a frustrating learning curve. I can now attest that both of these are true.

One of the problems people have complained most about with respect to Auto Layout is the extent to which Xcode’s Interface Builder falls short in providing assistance specifying constraints. As many people have noticed, Apple is addressing these complaints slowly but surely. Xcode 5’s UI for adding constraints and debugging layout issues is dramatically superior to the functionality in Xcode 4.

Still, there is much room for improvement.

One frustrating behavior arises when one deigns to move a large number of views from one position in a view hierarchy to another. For example, the simple and common task of collecting a number of views and embedding them in a new superview. This task is so common that Apple provides a variety of helpful tools under Editor -> Embed In to streamline the task.

Here’s the big downer with respect to constraints: whenever you move a view from one superview to another, all of the constraints attached to the old superview, constraints that you may have laboriously fine-tuned over hours or days, simply disappear. Poof!

This isn’t such a big deal when your constraints happen to match what Interface Builder suggests for you. But even very simple interfaces may have a fairly large number of constraints. Consider this contrived example, in which three buttons are arranged to roughly share the width of a container view:

SimpleButtons 1

Nine constraints, and the removal or misconfiguration of any one will lead to incorrect layout in my app. Yet simply embedding the views in a custom view wipes them all out:

TestView2 xib 1

This problem is bad enough in the contrived scenario about, but in my much more complicated interfaces, a collection of views might comprise 50 or more customized constraints. Here’s a “simple” subsection of MarsEdit’s post editor side panel:

ServerOptions

Having to piece those all together again just because I want to rearrange some views, well it makes me mad. And when I get mad? I get … innovative!

A Pattern For Transplanting Constraints

Thanks to recent changes in Interface Builder’s file-format for xib files, it’s more straight-forward than ever to hand-tune the contents of a xib file outside of Xcode. It should go without saying that in doing so, you take your fate into your hands, etc., etc. But if you’re anything like me, a little hand-editing in BBEdit is worth the risk if it saves hours of much more intricate hand-editing back in Interface Builder. You’ll save valuable time and also reduce the very real risk of missing some nuanced detail as you try to reimplement everything by hand.

So without further ado, here are steps you can follow to transplant a set of views in a xib file such that the constraints from the old view follow over to the new view:

  1. Make a backup of your .xib file. You’re going to screw this up at least once, so you’ll want something “sane” to fall back on when you do.
  2. In Interface Builder, create the parent view if it doesn’t exist already. Give it a real obvious name like “New Parent View” so you’ll be able to spot it later:

    NewParentView xib

  3. Save changes in IB to make sure the .xib file is up-to-date.
  4. Open the .xib file in a text editor such as BBEdit, or right-click the file in Xcode and select Edit As -> Source Code to edit as text right in Xcode.
  5. Locate the new parent view by searching on the name you gave it. For example, in my sample project the view looks like this in the text file: 
    <customView ... id="5M5-9Q-zMt" userLabel="New Parent View">
...
</customView>
  6. Locate the old parent view. If you have trouble, you may want to give it a custom name as well before saving again in IB. In my trivial example, the old parent is the first and only top-level view in the xib file, so it looks like this: 
    <customView id="1">
...
</customView>
  7. Take note of the id for the old parent view and the new parent view. We’re going to need these in a minute to tie up some loose ends.
  8. Locate the constraints from the old parent view, cut them, and paste them into the new parent view’s XML content. Again in my case it’s trivial because I want all the constraints from the old parent view. I cut them out of the old and into the new so things looks something like this: 
    <customView ... id="5M5-9Q-zMt" userLabel="New Parent View">
        ...
        <constraints>
                <constraint firstItem="rfg-hN-1Il" firstAttribute="leading" secondItem="1" secondAttribute="leading" constant="20" symbolic="YES" id="LOu-nX-awU"/>
                <constraint firstItem="8Ju-hM-RbA" firstAttribute="baseline" secondItem="Sgd-MR-FMw" secondAttribute="baseline" id="Mwc-6y-uaP"/>
                ...
        </constraints>
</customView>
  9. Locate the subviews themselves from the old parent view, and cut and paste them in the same way, making sure they reside in a <subviews> node in the new parent view. You should now have a new parent view whose xml topology looks something like this: 
    <customView ... id="5M5-9Q-zMt" userLabel="New Parent View">
	<rect ... />
	<autoresizingMask ... />
	<subviews>
		... your transplanted subviews here ...
	</subviews>
	<constraints>
		... your transplanted constraints here ...
	</constraints>
</customView>

    We’re close! But not quite finished. If you save and try to use the .xib now, you’ll find that Interface Builder rejects it as corrupted. What’s wrong? The constraints we transplanted mostly reference only the other views that we transplanted, but some of them also reference the old parent view.. To fix the integrity of these constraints, we need to update them to reference the new parent view instead.

  10. Refer back to the Interface Builder “id” values you noted in step 7. We need to locate any reference to the old parent view and adjust it so it references the new parent view. In our example, the old parent view id is “1” and the new parent view id is “5M5-9Q-zMt”. Specifically, we’re looking for attributes on our transplanted constraints where the “firstItem” or “secondItem” references the old parent ID: 
    <constraint firstItem="rfg-hN-1Il" firstAttribute="leading" secondItem="1" secondAttribute="leading" constant="20" symbolic="YES" id="LOu-nX-awU"/>

    Change the value secondItem=”1″ to secondItem=”5M5-9Q-zMt”, and repeat for any other instances where the old parent view is referenced.

  11. Save the text-formatted .xib file, cross your fingers, and hope you didn’t make any mistakes.
  12. Reopen the .xib file in Interface Builder, or if you’re already in Xcode’s text editor, right-click the file and select Open As -> Interface Builder.

If your combination of luck and skill paid off as planned, then you’ll see something beautiful like this:

TestView xib

All of my views, now situated within the new parent view, and the desired constraints in-tact.

I hope this helps serve as a specific reference for folks in the same boat as I am in, wanting to shuffle views around without losing the hard work I’ve put into my constraints. And I hope it also serves to inspire you to think beyond the limitations of our tools. As great as Xcode, Interface Builder, and a host of other essential technologies are, they often fall short of desired behavior. When they do, it’s often in our power to work around the issues and carry on developing software as effectively as we know how.