Category Archives: Xcode

Scripted Swift Warnings

Swift, Xcode

Since I complained yesterday about Swift’s lack of a counterpart to Objective C’s #warning directive, folks have been in touch to encourage another solution to this problem. I could take advantage of Xcode’s standardized, built-in support for text-based comments such as “// FIXME” and “// TODO”. Using this notation causes the affected source lines to show up in Xcode’s per-file function popup, and other folks affected by the issue I describe above have added scripted build phases to emit text that Xcode will treat as a warning for each of these lines.

I initially dismissed the solution out of hand, because I anticipated that searching all of my sources with every build would be excessive. I’m kind of a stickler for fast build times because I like to do quick iterations when writing and testing code. My largest source base, MarsEdit, is big but not huge. But, appreciating that computers and SSDs are fast, I decided to test the straightforward script linked above to see how much time it would add to each of my build iterations. On average, it’s about 1.2s per build. It doesn’t sound like much, but personally that would nag at me. I’ve made a fuss over build phase speeds in the past, and reported bugs against unnecessary slowdowns in Apple’s standard build phases.

Zev Eisenberg suggested on Twitter that the use of specialized search tools such as the_silver_searcher might help. It’s true, it might, but then I’d be going down a path of installing custom software, writing custom scripts, all to accommodate what is a very useful feature that I personally still believe should be built in to the language. Or, at the very least, the language’s feature set should accommodate efficiently extending it to support something like #warning.

We’ll see where things go. I may yet end up adopting a convoluted (to my mind) approach involving expensive, redundant build phase script that scans my entire source base with every build, but more likely I’ll keep scratching my head while using the one-line, inline hack that I previously described.

Artificial Swift Warnings

Swift, Xcode

I’ve been tackling more and more of my coding challenges in Swift, recently. I’ve run into a number of hangups. Some attributable to the learning curve, some to bugs in Swift or Xcode, and some to features I’ve grown to love in clang and Objective C which are simply not present in Swift.

For years, I’ve been in the habit of tagging my in-progress code with “artificial warnings.” While working in code, if a concern crosses my mind, the easiest way to make sure I won’t ship the software without addressing that concern is to add it directly to the code:

#warning Step through this in a debugger and confirm it still works...

Or:

#warning This isn't implemented yet, need to handle XYZ...

These warnings serve as an active reminder of things to fix while I’m working in Xcode, since they show up in the build navigator, and are illuminated in the source code while stepping through with the debugger. And because of my strict “no warnings” policy for shipping code, they are guaranteed to show up as errors in any Release build, thus thwarting an accidental shipment of code that is known to need further refinement.

I don’t think Swift supports anything like the “#warning” preprocessor directive.

The closest I’ve come to matching this behavior is a trick that employs Swift’s willingness to emit a warning for unreachable code:

if false { "in lieu of #warning, this will do" }

Unfortunately, it only shows up in the issue navigator as “Will never be executed,” and doesn’t show the specific warning text contained in the string. But at least as soon as click on the warning, I am reminded of the concern at hand.

I don’t know if the Swift team is philosophically opposed to implementing support for #warning, or something like it. I filed an enhancement request with the Swift project. In the meantime, if false { “life goes on.” }.

Update: Many folks have suggested a build-phase script to tag warnings. I wrote more about that option in a followup post.

A Tale Of Two Optimizers

Swift, Xcode

I have quipped a few times that my biggest problems with Swift so far have to do with struggles in the debugger. It seems slow, inaccurate, harder to use than in Objective C. Some of this is just a learning curve, but other aspects seemed fundamentally broken. I whined on Twitter about a scenario in which lldb seemed utterly unaware of one of my variables:

A kind Apple employee, Kate Stone, followed up with me and ultimately encouraged me to file a bug:

I obliged, filing Radar #26032843. Today, Apple got back to me with a followup, suggesting rather gently that I may have neglected to disable optimization in my target. Rookie move! The kind of behavior I was seeing in the debugger is exactly what happens when lldb can’t make as much sense of your code because of inlined functions, loops that have been restructured, etc.

In fact, I had correlated the symptoms with such a problem, but when I went to check on the status of my optimization settings, everything looked fine. Why? Because I was looking, by habit, at the Clang LLVM “Code Generation” settings for optimization:

MarsEdit xcodeproj

See? Optimization disabled. Just as it is for all my projects, and all my targets, because I define it once in my centralized Debug “.xcconfig” file, to be sure I never screw it up:

// We only specify an optimization setting for Debug builds.
// We rely upon Apple's default settings to produce reasonable
// choices for Release builds
GCC_OPTIMIZATION_LEVEL = 0

So why does debugging Swift fail so hard for me? Because Swift doesn’t use that optimization setting. Scrolling down a little farther, I find the culprit in Swift’s own compiler settings section:

MarsEdit xcodeproj

So the lesson is that new Swift developers coming from a legacy of Objective C, C++, or C development need to take stock of Swift compiler settings because they are liable to be rooted in completely different build settings. On the one hand, I’m glad Apple is finally able to get away from a build setting like “GCC_OPTIMIZATION_LEVEL” (though keeping the name in the GCC -> LLVM transition prevented problems like this back then), but on the other hand, it’s kind of annoying to have to express high level directives that affect whether my code will be debuggable or not using multiple build settings.

At least, because I am not an animal, this will also only ever need to be done once, with an edit to the pertinent “.xcconfig” file:

// We only specify an optimization setting for Debug builds, we rely upon
// Apple's default settings to produce reasonable choices for Release builds
GCC_OPTIMIZATION_LEVEL = 0
SWIFT_OPTIMIZATION_LEVEL = -Onone

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to take a tour of other Swift-specific compiler settings to make sure I’m not shooting myself in the foot in some other way!

Careful What You Wish For

Bug Reports, Xcode

I am a well-known proponent of bug filing. In fact, I filed a bug last year that argued Xcode should apply the custom Code Signing Flags for a project when code signing the bundled Swift libraries that are installed in in an app’s bundle.

I noticed that at some point along the way, Apple did fix the bug! Exciting! Time to rejoice, no? Well, no. Because while the fix for the bug addressed my original complaint, it brought a new headache which I hadn’t anticipated.

For my app MarsEdit, I supply a custom designated requirement for the code signing phase. The long and short of this approach is that through careful specification of a designated requirement, you can arrange it so that if the user stores an item in the keychain from one version of your app (say the Mac App Store version), then the same app can access the data later without prompting the user, even if it has a different bundle ID, or is signed by a different identity (say, because it’s a direct sale version).

The problem I’m running into now, as I dabble with adding Swift-based code to MarsEdit, is the bundled Swift libraries are being signed with my app’s custom designated requirement. Oops. This never would have happened if Apple hadn’t … fixed the bug I reported.

I’m not sure what the right solution is, or even how to best approach a workaround. The copying of Swift libraries and their subsequent signing is not only opaque to developers, but it happens after the entire user-configurable build process is done. It seems as though to work around the problem in such a way that I can still supply a designated requirement for my app, I may need to avoid adding the flag to OTHER_CODE_SIGNING_FLAGS, and amend the designated requirement on my own sometime after the Xcode build process is complete.

I find the code signing configuration options to be pretty troubling for this reason, among others. The highest level code signing identity (and now flags) are used implicitly by Xcode for some code signing operations that are opaque to developers. It puts us in a bind when something subtle turns out to be not quite right with the resulting built product.

I filed a new bug, Radar #25579693, to raise the issue with Apple about the can of worms that fixing my previous report has caused. In the mean time, I’m on the hunt for workarounds! I’ll update this post when I feel I’ve got something good.

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.

Constraint Activation

iOS, OS X, Xcode

I got started with Auto Layout a few years ago, and on the whole I’m very happy with the framework. It can be exceedingly frustrating at times, especially when some nuanced constraint priority or other is imposing a layout that just doesn’t make sense. But I measure its value by the degree to which I shudder in imagining going back to the old springs and struts approach.

Although some interfaces work perfectly with a fixed set of constraints, other interfaces require dynamic manipulation at runtime in order to achieve the desired result. For example, if a change in a preferences panel brings in some new element to the UI, it might make sense to adjust constraints at runtime to accommodate it.

Prior to OS X 10.10 and iOS 8.0, this could be achieved in a general case by removing and adding constraints as needed to the view in question:

  1. Remove constraints and save them somewhere, e.g. in an array, for later.
  2. Add or remove elements to the view.
  3. Add constraints, e.g. by fetching them from a saved array.

It is important to remove constraints and save them before removing an affected element, because removing the element will cause the constraint to be implicitly removed before you can save it.

Starting in OS X 10.10 and iOS 8.0, I was intrigued by the announcement that NSLayoutConstraint now supports a property called “active,” which can be used to, you guessed it, activate or deactivate a constraint. I assumed this would be an answer to my prayers: a constraint could now be left installed on a view for safe-keeping, but its impact on layout would be negated by setting it to be “inactive.” I envisioned setting up competing groups of constraints on a view and simply activating or deactiving them en masse when the need arose.

I assumed wrong.

Looking at the documentation more closely, I see the description of what the method actually does:

Activating or deactivating the constraint calls addConstraint: and removeConstraint: on the view that is the closest common ancestor of the items managed by this constraint. Use this property instead of calling addConstraint: or removeConstraint: directly.

The rub is that an NSLayoutConstraint whose “active” is set to false will be removed from view it is installed on. So if you have any hopes or dreams of reapplying that constraint later, you’ll need to save it somewhere, just as before. If you don’t keep a strong reference to the constraint, it may be deallocated. If you tried to go back and set “active” a constraint that you referenced as a weak IBOutlet, for example, it would be nil by the time you tried to do so.

The OS X 10.10 AppKit Release Notes makes a clearer emphasis on the intended utility of the “active” property:

Under Mac OS X 10.10, it is now possible to directly activate and deactivate NSLayoutConstraint objects, without having to worry about adding them to an appropriate ancestor view. This is accomplished by manipulating NSLayoutConstraint’s new boolean property ‘active’. Class methods are available for operating on multiple constraints simultaneously, which can be much faster. The legacy API on NSView for adding & removing constraints is now deprecated.

So “active” is not a convenience for easily toggling whether an installed layout constraint has an effect or not, but a convenience for the plumbing of installing and removing them. The emphasis on adding and removal API being deprecated especially underscores that.

Having written this all out, it suddenly occurs to me that the “active” flag I was dreaming of is actually sort of available, and has been all along. Because NSLayoutConstraint supports a mutable “priority” property, you can effectively disable it by setting its priority lower than any other constraints that affect the same view. One caveat though is you can’t change a constraint’s priority to or from “required” at runtime, so you have to choose a priority lower than 1000. Something like this should work:

NSLayoutPriority newPriority = activate ? 999 : 1;
[dynamicConstraint setPriority:newPriority];

So long as a set of counterpart constraints affecting similar views is always prioritize to the inverse when toggling state, something like this should workâ„¢. Of course, it requires knowing the “active” priority in code. If a given disabled constraint should actually have priority 501 or 250, or whatever, then you’d have to save that priority somewhere. In which case you may as well go back to saving the whole constraint.

Remote Codesign Trust

iOS, Mac, Worfklow, Xcode

It’s common to use a remote, headless build server to perform iOS or Mac builds for which the “codesign” tool must be run to sign either the resulting binary, the installer package, or both.

My friend Mitch Cohen raised a concern on our local CocoaHeads that, since 10.11.1 was released, there is a problem with such setups. The dialog that pops up when using a code signing identity for the first time ignores clicks to the “Allow” and “Always Allow” buttons:

Panel prompting to allow permission to use codesign tool with private key.

If you look in the system Console, you see a line along the lines of this, correlated to each attempted click of an “Allow” button:

3/15/16 8:51:55.303 AM SecurityAgent[65532]: Ignoring user action since the dialog has received events from an untrusted source

The changes are apparently rooted in a legitimate security update made by Apple, but the end result for us developers is pretty bleak. It’s seemingly impossible to authorize use of a code signing identity on a remote server. As my friend Mitch put it, he has to call IT and “get someone to go into the data closet” every time this happens. What a drag!

I’m also affected by this issue, since I use a headless Mac Mini as a build server. Lucky for me the server is in my house, but it’s still a drag to have to go log in and control the computer with an attached keyboard.

I poked around for a solution to this problem, and found it lurking in the answers and comments of a Stack Overflow question. The basic idea is you can convince OS X to trust codesign to use the tool, just as if you had clicked the “Allow” button in that UI prompt. Here is a recipe for doing just that, logged in as a remote user over say Screen Sharing:

  1. Open Keychain Access and locate the pertinent private key. You may have to click on the “Certificates” section and then type in part of the name of the identity in question, e.g. “iPhone Distribution”:

    Screenshot of Keychain Access showing the private key

  2. Click the private key and then select File -> Export Items from the menu bar. Save the item anywhere on your server, for example the Desktop. Give it a password e.g. “hardpassword”.
  3. Now stop. Think real hard before you continue. You should have a backup of that private key somewhere. If you don’t? Don’t continue. Did you just make a backup to the Desktop? Yes, in theory. But if these are the only two copies of this private key you need to think long and hard before you continue with the next step, which I absolutely do not advise you to do.
  4. Delete the private key from your keychain. This is the scary (see above), but necessary step to get the Keychain to respect the new permissions you’re going to grant the key in a minute.
  5. Switch to the Terminal and issue a command like the following: 
    security import ~/Desktop/Certificates.p12 -k ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain -P hardpassword -t priv -T /usr/bin/codesign -T /Applications/Utilities/Keychain\ Access.app

    It may be important to specify the path to the specific keychain, and to belabor the point you’re importing a private key with the “-t priv” parameter. It seemed like maybe things weren’t working for me until I deigned to include these. In any case, the goal here after running this command is that the private key shown in the screenshot above should now be back in your keychain, but if you double-click it to examine its permissions, you’ll find that codesign is listed among the approved apps. If you need to provide access to other tools than codesign, list them as shown above with multiple -T parameters to the “security import” command.

In my tests that seems to address the issue. After following the recipe above carefully, I can remotely “codesign” with the specified identity to my heart’s content, without a UI prompt of any kind.

It strikes me that this trick probably shouldn’t work, at least in light of Apple’s clamping down on the ability to change authorizations through the UI of Keychain Access. So I won’t be surprised if this series of tricks doesn’t stand the test of time. For now though? No need to call IT and have them go into the data closet.

Update: Erik Schwiebert reports that Apple has addressed this problem in 10.11.4 betas:

That’s great news!

Supercharged Search Scopes

Xcode

Xcode’s search facility is pretty robust, offering the ability to add custom scopes that can restrict with some precision the focus of your search:

Xcode custom search scope editor

However, if you browse the list of options in the popup menu for some of these items, there are frustrating omissions. For example, in the screenshot above you can see that I’m searching files that are within a folder “RSCommon” but whose path is not “YuckySources”. Unfortunately this search is not very useful, because none of my files has a path exactly equal to “YuckySources”. What I really want is an option to specify that the path does not contain “YuckySources”, but the option is not made available to me. Similarly, Xcode offers no choice for “is not within folder.” Generally, there are glaring omissions for negating conditions. (Radar #24510002).

Frustrated by this limitation, I went poking around in Xcode’s configuration files, and was pleased to discover that search scopes are saved in plain text in a file called SearchScopes.xcsclist, for example in Xcode’s configuration folder:

[Home] -> Library -> Xcode -> UserData -> SearchScopes.xcsclist

Update: As of Xcode 9 the search scopes are stored in a file called IDEFindNavigatorScopes.plist.

If you open this up in a text editor, you’ll see that in fact each search scope definition is substantially defined by a standard NSPredicate style expression:

<Scope
  name = "Yummy Sources"
  predicate = "path != &quot;YuckySources&quot; AND location_filesystem == &quot;/Users/daniel/Sources/RSCommon&quot;"
  uuid = "F5110DAA-5DE7-4DD8-A4B1-6D7CB4A2DF1E">
</Scope>

Do I dare to dream that fine-tuning this predicate in a text editor will lead to the desired search results in Xcode? I do! I quit Xcode and edited the predicate in the file so it reads:

(NOT path CONTAINS "YuckySources") AND location_filesystem == "/Volumes/Data/daniel/Sources-Modern/RSCommon"

This expresses the predicate for what I really wanted my search scope to be, but which Xcode wouldn’t allow me to configure. Opening Xcode and selecting the “Yummy Sources” search now allows me to search for results in RSCommon, but NOT in YuckySources. We’re golden!

So I think the limitation here is in Xcode’s predicate editor, which is apparently not robust enough to specify the variety of options afforded by predicate syntax. In fact a caveat here is if I now attempt to edit the hand-tuned predicate above, Xcode crashes with an exception:

comparisonPredicate should be an instance inheriting from NSComparisonPredicate, but it is <NSCompoundPredicate: 0x7fedcff19ff0>

Lucky for us, the code that applies the predicate seems perfectly happy with the hand-tuned, robust predicate. So I’ll be contented to continue using my fancy, supercharged search scopes, but I’ll remember to edit them in BBEdit when necessary.

By the way, the search scopes you create in Xcode are saved by default to the home folder relative path described above, but Xcode will also search for and load any search scopes configured within a workspace’s xcuserdata folder. For example, if you want to configure search scopes that are only meaningful to your “Delicious” project, you could store the configurations in this file:

/Delicious.xcworkspace/xcuserdata/[yourname].xcuserdatad/SearchScopes.xcsclist

I hope this understanding of Xcode’s search scopes helps you transform its already powerful search capability into an even better, finer-tuned resource for navigating your source files.

Unsteady Platform

Debugging, iOS, OS X, Xcode

I ran into a vexing build failure with one of my iOS integration builds. The vast majority of everything in my complex project, consisting of dozens of dependencies, has built fine, but at link time things blow up because one of the dependencies is not of the expected architecture.

Undefined symbols for architecture armv7:
"_RSIsEmpty", referenced from:
-[RSFormattingMacro emptyMarkupPlaceholders] in RSFormattingMacro.o
ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture armv7

Ugh, huh, wha? How is this happening? It turns out the library in which “RSIsEmpty” resides, RSFoundation, is being linked to, but it’s opting for an OS X version of the library instead of an iOS one. Because this is an integration build that performs a number of related builds for both Mac and iOS, it makes some sense that I would have both an iOS and OS X build result in the build folder. But even if I have built copies for either architecture, why is it opting for the OS X version on an iOS build?

I decided to blow away all the built versions of RSFoundation and try the build again. This time, I got an even more perplexing failure:

clang: error: no such file or directory: '[...]/build-Integration/Release/RSFoundation.framework/RSFoundation'

I’m scratching my head. Did it somehow get removed as a dependency? But then I notice something subtle. It’s looking for the framework in the “Release” build folder, but for my iOS build it should be looking in “Release-iphoneos”. What the heck is going on?

In spite of the sole build target in this scheme being an iOS app, Xcode (actually xcodebuild) is opting to build this scheme with a default destination of OS X. I don’t know of a direct way to get xcodebuild to list the available destinations for a scheme, but I know that if you pass a bogus destination platform, it will do the honor of listing its impressions:

xcodebuild -destination "platform=xx" -scheme MyIPhoneApp

The requested device could not be found because no platform could be found for the requested platform name.

Available destinations for the "MyIPhoneApp" scheme:
		{ platform:OS X, arch:x86_64 }
		{ platform:iOS Simulator, id:6DF04FFC-1C8A-4745-8F8C-7369E9CBF8DB, OS:9.3, name:iPad 2 }
		[... every other iOS simulator on my Mac ...]

Aha! So it thinks my iPhone app is suitable for OS X. But why? After a great deal of experimentation and poking around, I discovered the root of the problem is summarized by this true statement:

If any target in a Scheme’s dependency tree targets OS X, then the scheme itself will also be considered to target OS X.

In retrospect, this explains the problem perfectly. I had recently added a subproject to my dependency tree that builds both an iOS and a Mac version of a library. That’s fine: it works pretty well these days to allow targets for differing platforms to coexist in the same project file. But each of these targets also shares a dependency on a single, legitimate OS X target: a helper tool used in the process of generating that project’s own source files.

This must be at least a relatively common scenario for iOS builds of certain complexity. Because the platform on which all iOS builds run is OS X, any helper tools that are compiled and used in the process of generating sources or otherwise processing build materials, must be built for OS X.

The workaround to my specific problem is to specify a platform explicitly on the command line. I can’t assume that because the scheme targets iOS, it will necessarily default to an iOS platform target. I consider this a bug, not only because it led to this difficult to diagnose build error, but because it has other ramifications such as the presentation in Xcode’s scheme popup for these projects a useless, distracting “My Mac” target which should never be selected for the schemes in question.

I filed this as Radar #24247701: A scheme whose target has dependencies on another platform shouldn’t “support” that platform.

Not Available On tvOS

tvOS, Xcode

Along with many other Mac and iOS developers, I’m digging into Apple’s SDK for tvOS development. As announced in the special event yesterday, the SDK is based on iOS and will be very familiar to most Apple platform developers. There are, however, some differences: functionality from iOS frameworks that is not available on tvOS, as well as a handful of new frameworks specifically suited to the needs of “TV apps.”

A very notable absence is UIWebView. Black Pixel’s Daniel Pasco points out on Twitter that this will be a significant impediment to porting many iOS apps:

When I say UIWebView is absent, I should clarify that the class name is still present in the UIKit headers on the tvOS SDK, but it is marked with a new compiler availability attribute, __TVOS_PROHIBITED. This is handy because at least when you run up against the problem, you don’t have to fret about whether you simply neglected to link against the right framework. It’s there, it may or may not work, you just can’t use it.

In case it’s not obvious, you can use a massive search of the SDK’s header files to zero in on other such classes and methods that may be prohibited from use in TV apps:

grep -r TVOS_PROHIBITED UIKit.framework/Headers/*

(Note: it was brought to my attention that this search is purely academic because Apple has published a browsable list of API changes from iOS to tvOS.)

The results are a doozy! But many of the marked items simply wouldn’t make sense on Apple TV, like mucking with the UIStatusBar, are marked as prohibited. There are other tags too, such as __TVOS_UNAVAILABLE, which presumably denotes that technologies that Apple would like to provide but hasn’t yet, and __TVOS_DEPRECATED, which blessedly does not yet match any API provided in the tvOS SDK.

Take a look in the Availability.h header file for this and other interesting attribute definitions, including counterparts for OSX, iOS, and watchOS.