Category Archives: Xcode

Installing Symbols For WatchOS

For months I have been plagued by Xcode’s persistent failure to successfully install WatchOS device support on my Mac. If I open Xcode, and my iPhone (paired with an Apple Watch) is attached to the Mac, I am greeted by a progress indicator such as this:

InterfaceController swift

Because I don’t actually do any watchOS development, this has mostly been a mild annoyance. The bug doesn’t seem to affect the performance of my Mac, and other actions I perform in Xcode continue without delay. However, for those of you who are actually doing Watch development, if you run into this problem, you’ll be perpetually greeted by this error when you try to debug on a real device:

Xcode panel refusing to install on a device because of missing Apple Watch symbols.

The worst side-effect of this bug for me, and the problem that finally encouraged me to hunker down and solve the issue, is the fact that each attempt to “Install Symbols” is associated with a fresh download of a larger-than-200MB file from Apple to my Mac. This is no big deal on my home network, but when I’m roaming and tethered to my bandwidth-metered iPhone, it can lead to costly overage charges.

I’ve been to hell and back tracking down exactly how Xcode installs these symbols, where it fails, and how to work around the problem. I’ll give an overview of how Xcode’s symbol installation process works, and walk you through one concrete method for working around the problem, getting those precious symbols installed, and breaking the cycle of perpetual failed installations.

Symbol Installation Overview

First I want to give you a high level idea of how Xcode downloads and installs symbols. Here are the steps that take place:

  1. A device suitable for development is connected.
  2. Xcode looks for existing symbols in the suitable home directory location
  3. If symbols are not already installed, the symbol-installation process begins.
  4. A disk image file containing the required materials is downloaded to a temporary folder.
  5. The disk image file is copied to a Caches subfolder in your home directory.
  6. The disk image is mounted at a temporary location on your Mac
  7. A macOS Installer package on the disk image is used to install symbol files directly into your home folder.
  8. The temporary disk image is unmounted.
  9. The cached disk image file is deleted.

In my tests, the failure to successfully install watchOS symbols broke down in step 7, where the package is supposed to successfully copy symbol files into my home folder. I was able to determine that the Apple infrastructure responsible for the installation is failing on my Mac with a cryptic authentication error:

Could not download and install Symbols for watchOS 3.1 (14S471). Authorization is required to install the packages

The failure is not happening in Xcode per se, but in a helper tool that is part of the private PackageKit.framework. I filed Radar #29568241, in the hopes that somebody at Apple will have insight as the root cause of the problem, and how it can be fixed for good in either Xcode, or in the configurations of affected users’ Macs.

Fix It Yourself

To manually accomplish what Xcode is failing to do, we need to:

  1. Get a copy of the downloaded disk image.
  2. Copy the pertinent files out of the disk image’s installer package.
  3. Copy the pertinent files into the correct installation path in ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/

Because simply creating the directory at the installation path is enough to stop Xcode attempting to install symbols, I’m going to cover that first. Folks who don’t need or want the symbols for Watch development will solve the problem sufficiently after this step.

Determine the Installation Path

Unfortunately, the path is quite specific to the Watch device at hand, and may be difficult to guess. Here’s one way of figuring it out. Making sure you have an iPhone connected that triggers the symbol installation in Xcode, do the following:

  1. Quit Xcode.
  2. From the Terminal, navigate to Xcode’s binary executable folder:
    cd /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/
  3. Run Xcode with a special flag to cause additional logging to display:
    ./Xcode -DVTDownloadableLogLevel 3
  4. Wait for Xcode to launch and start installing symbols.
  5. Scan the output in Terminal for a line like this:
    Starting a download for Watch1,2 3.1 (14S471), to file path /Volumes/Data/daniel/Library/Developer/Xcode/watchOS DeviceSupport/Watch1,2 3.1 (14S471)/Symbols

    Of course, your output will be slightly different, but depending on the version of Watch and watchOS you have, the important part is relative to your home folder. In my case, I need to make sure this folder exists:

    ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/watchOS DeviceSupport/Watch1,2 3.1 (14S471)/Symbols

If you don’t care about Watch development, this is your big chance: just create that folder now. Quit and relaunch Xcode again, and you’ll see that your problems are over. No more symbol installations required. If you skim the logging output from above you’ll see that the “InstalledIfAllPathsArePresent” key in one of the dictionaries indicates that the path merely being present is enough to convince Xcode it’s “installed.”

If you do care about Watch development, you’re going to want those symbols. Let’s tackle that problem next.

Getting the Disk Image

Remember back in “Symbol Installation Overview,” I described the installation failing in step 7: where a package on a mounted volume is attempted to be installed. Unfortunately, this failure does not prevent steps 8 and 9 from proceeding, so when the whole procedure is over, there are no obvious artifacts left around to work with. The disk image, that was copied to ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.dt.Xcode/Downloads in step 5, is available for such a short period of time, you’re unlikely to nab it before Xcode deletes it upon failure.

You may have noticed in the Xcode logging output that many URLs to web resources are passed around. It’s likely that one of these contains the required disk image content, but I thought it would be safer to catch Xcode in the act and use precisely the disk image file that it itself was intending to use.

Yet another “secret” Xcode user default key can help us here. Once again, navigate to the Terminal to execute Xcode manually. This time, we’ll pass a flag that instructs it explicitly not to delete the coveted disk image file after it’s done:

./Xcode -DVTDownloadableLeaveTemporaryFiles 1

This time you’ll have to wait again until the process tries, and fails, but when you’re done you should find a suitable disk image file waiting for you at:

~/Library/Caches/com.apple.dt.Xcode/Downloads/Xcode.Symbols.Watch1,2.14S471-3.1.dmg

(Or with whatever name is suitable for the version of Watch and OS you are accommodating.)

Copying the Symbol Files Out

Double-click the disk image to mount it on your Mac. You’ll find a volume appears with a suitable device-oriented name, and a matching file within called e.g. “Watch1,1_Watch1,2.pkg”.

Warning: Do not open and install this package willy-nilly without reading the following carefully. This is a standard Installer package, and double-clicking it on your Mac will launch the system-standard Installer application. However, agreeing to let it “just install” on your Mac could have unintended consequences. The files in this package are named very similarly to many system files on your Mac, but of course these files are binaries for a ARM based Watch device, and not an x86_64 personal computer.

There are many techniques for getting the files out of an Installer Package without actually, you know, installing. You could use an app like Pacifist to extract them directly to a folder on your disk. There may also be a way to invoke the command-line “installer” tool in such a way that it simply spits the files out where you want them. For that matter, it might be safe to simply “Choose Folder…” from the Installer app, and trust that it will install everything in that folder instead of on the root of the volume.

Me? I decided to strike a semi-paranoid compromise. I used the Installer app, but instead of installing to my Mac’s main volume, I created a writable disk image in Disk Utility, and targeted that volume explicitly:

WatchHack

When the installation was complete, I had a mounted volume, filled with the contents that Xcode has presumably been intending to copy into my home folder.

WatchHack

Finish the Job

At this point you know correct install location in your home folder, and you have a copy of all the files that should be there. It should be as simple as selecting the files from “WatchHack” and dragging them to the “Symbols” folder in the appropriate ~/Library/Developer subfolder.

When the symbol files have been copied in, quit and relaunch Xcode. Not only should it avoid that nasty “Installing Symbols” phase, but building and running on your physical watchOS device should once again work as expected.

Xcode 6 On Sierra

Xcode 6 and Xcode 7 are not supported by Apple on macOS Sierra, and should not be used for production work.

But what if you have a good reason for running one or the other? Maybe you want to compare a behavior in the latest Xcode 8 with an earlier version of the app. Instead of keeping a virtual machine around, or a second partition with an older OS release, it is liberating to be able to run and test against older versions of Xcode.

So far, it appears that Xcode 7 “mostly works” in spite of being unsupported by Apple. I’ve run into some launch-time crashes, but reopening the app tends to succeed.

Xcode 6 will flat out fail to launch, because one of its internal plugins depends on a private framework (Ubiquity.framework) that is no longer present on macOS Sierra. If you were willing to hack a copy of Xcode 6, however, you could get it running. You definitely shouldn’t do this, but if you’re curious how it could be done, here’s how:

  1. Always have a backup copy of any data that is important to you.
  2. Locate a copy of /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Ubiquity.framework from the previous OS X release.
  3. Copy the framework to within Xcode 6’s own Contents/Frameworks bundle subfolder:
    ditto /my/old/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Ubiquity.framework ./Xcode.app/Contents/Frameworks/Ubiquity.framework
  4. Navigate to the problematic Xcode plugin and modify its library lookup table so that it points to the app-bundled copy of Ubiquity.framework, instead of the non-existent system-installed copy.
    cd Xcode.app/Contents/PlugIns/iCloudSupport.ideplugin/Contents/MacOS
    install_name_tool -change /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Ubiquity.framework/Versions/A/Ubiquity @rpath/Ubiquity.framework/Versions/A/Ubiquity ./iCloudSupport
    
  5. Now that you've modified Xcode, its code signature is invalid. You can repair it by signing it with your own credentials or with an ad hoc credential:
    codesign --deep -f -s - ./Xcode.app
    
  6. Did I mention you really shouldn't do this?

Apple has good reason to warn people off running older versions of Xcode, but if you absolutely need to get something running again, it's often possible.

Swifty SDK Changes

I’m not quite ready to leap to Swift 3.0, so when the Xcode 8 beta asked me to migrate my existing Swift code, I opted to switch to Swift 2.3.

Swift 2.3 is notable for its utter dearth of new behaviors, compared to Swift 2.2.1. Since no code changes are required, you should be able to opt in to 2.3 on Xcode 8, while continuing to build and distribute with Swift 2.2.1 on Xcode 7.

On the other hand, you may run into some system SDK changes that force you to accommodate distinctions between, for example, the macOS 10.11 and 10.12 SDKs. Here’s an example of a build failure I ran into when I set to building my app on Xcode 8:

Image of Xcode exhibiting a build-time error because of a Swift method call

“invalid use of ‘()’ to call a value of non-function type ‘Selector'”

What does it mean? It means that in the 10.11 SDK, “action” is defined as a method:

@protocol NSValidatedUserInterfaceItem
- (nullable SEL)action;
- (NSInteger)tag;
@end

While in the 10.12 SDK, it’s been upgraded to a property:

@protocol NSValidatedUserInterfaceItem
@property (readonly, nullable) SEL action;
@property (readonly) NSInteger tag;
@end

Objective-C doesn’t care whether you access the value as a property, or by invoking the method that implements the property. Swift … does.

So, the fix in Xcode 8, with the 10.12 SDK, is to delete those parentheses so Swift appreciates that it’s accessing a property. But doing so will break the build back on the 10.11 SDK. What’s a forward-looking, backward-looking developer to do? You might think you could take advantage of Swift’s #available operator, and that in fact best expresses what we’re trying to do: to behave differently depending on the specific SDK that is being used:

if #available(OSX 10.12, *) {
	thisAction = anObject.action
}
else {
	thisAction = anObject.action()
}

But this still produces a build error, because Swift compiles both code paths of an #available block. Unfortunately, I think the only way to convince Swift to absolutely ignore the problematic line is to use a Swift compiler check, instead. Note that this is a bad solution because we are fundamentally not concerned about the version of Swift being used. If Swift 2.3 were made available in Xcode 7, against earlier SDKs, then the logic of our test would fail:

#if swift(>=2.3)
	thisAction = anObject.action
#else
	thisAction = anObject.action()
#endif

In my opinion, we need a compile time, conditional code exclusion that operates on the SDK, similarly to #available. Something like “#if sdk(OSX 10.12)”. As far as I know, nothing like this exists.

I’ll report a bug to Apple requesting such functionality, but I wonder if I’m overlooking something obvious that already fits the bill. Any ideas?

Update: Radar #26895983.

Dynamic Development Team

The first Xcode 8 beta was released at WWDC, and includes a major revision to the way code signing is handled by default. You can watch the video or read the slides on Apple’s WWDC Videos page.

A major change from Xcode 7 is that Xcode now requires that every target in your project specify a development team, even when the manual code signing option is selected.

This is a nuisance to developers who have fine-tuned their code signing process such that signing is configured elsewhere: for example, in a centralized Xcode configuration file that imparts signing information to all projects in an organization.

The problem is worse for open source projects, where a project may be expected to be checked out and built by a variety of organizations. In this scenario, each organization will have to somehow automate the insertion of a valid team name and ID in the project file after every checkout or update.

The DevelopmentTeam and DevelopmentTeamName values are stored in the Xcode project file, so they can’t be defined in Xcode configuration files the way so many other settings that affect build behaviors can.

Xcode needs some mechanism for providing these values without manually, permanently altering the affected project files. I would welcome either a mechanism for specifying the values in the Xcode configuration file specified for the project, or a wildcard type value that can be selected to indicate the “default team” should be used.

(Radar #26892618)

Update: It turns out my wishes are already answered. The new PROVISIONING_PROFILE_SPECIFIER build setting will impart the desired team information to Xcode, even if provisioning profiles are not used. So, something like this in my Xcode configuration file:

PROVISIONING_PROFILE_SPECIFIER = 493CVA9A35/

Quiets all of Xcode’s gripes about requiring a team name, and doesn’t require that I tediously update every last target with explicit team information. This doesn’t exactly solve the challenge for open source projects, because organizations using an open source project will still have to override the configuration file or build settings for the projects they check out. As far as I know there is no way to define PROVISIONING_PROFILE_SPECIFIER generically, the way you can specify code signing identities as e.g. “Mac Developer”. It would be great if open source projects could declare a PROVISIONING_PROFILE_SPECIFIER (when needed) as:

PROVISIONING_PROFILE_SPECIFIER = Automatic/

And allow the host project’s prevailing team identity automatically apply. But, I am satisfied to know this at least doesn’t need to be manually set everywhere in order to continue building my projects successfully.

Scripted Swift Warnings

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

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

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

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

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

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.