Is Xcode finicky?

[Jim Birkenseer]

Hi Folks,

I'm very new to Xcode (I have only used it for couple of ID plugin development projects), and I'm hoping that someone could please give me a reality check; and perhaps even telling me what I might doing wrong...

So, I have been fighting a lot with Xcode 2.4.1 (PowerMac G5, 2.5GB RAM). It seems that it's really easy to break an InDesign Xcode project simply by poking around in the project's Build settings.

For example, I created a project with DollyXs and the project built without incident. Then I was poking around the project's build settings and clicked in the "Value" text edit field in the "Header Search Paths" setting. I then clicked out of it without typing anything. Once I did that, I could no longer build the project. Looking through the 3000+ build errors, it appears that the InDesign header files could not be found. I am sometimes able to get the project to build again by clicking in the same field and clicking out while changing the "Based On" popup menu (at the bottom of the settings window) to the different settings, but it often takes many tries.

The reason that I write this now is that I just had to reconstruct a project (for the third time) in order to get it to working again. Before reconstruction, I was able to get it to build, but my built plugin wound up crashing the debug build of InDesign at startup. The crash was memory related and I could not get the debugger to work with the project, so I could not figure out where is was going wrong. After a bunch of time trying to figure out what was wrong, I gave up and and I used Dolly to create a new project. I then re-added all of my existing source files, and the project ran without error.

Does anyone else here have this issue, or is it just me? Could this be an issue with the way DollyXs creates the file? I find it hard to believe that Xcode is this touchy, but it sure seems like it is to me.

-- Jim

[D¡rk Becker]

Hi Jim,

you are not alone, I'm also fighting the same windmills, as probably most others that are targeting OSX.

For historic reasons / experiences, I am no big fan of Adobe's Dolly generated and projects and templates. Therefor I just took a working sample (the XCode template) as starting point, tried to understand it and tweak it to my own requirements. Here a few tips:

XCode projects are bundles - folders with plain text files in them. You can use CodeWarrior's Compare Files feature to see what changed comparing to a backup, or even features of your version control. Version control is highly recommended for such issues, after Apple abandoned Projector I tried without for a while but now am turning everything to Subversion.

Build settings follow a complicated order of inheritance and overriding. In the build settings info panel, you can easily detect local overrides as they are displayed in bold face, and to revert them to the inherited value you can delete them via backspace. Search the XCode help for details, "Editing Build Settings" .

Dirk

[Jim Birkenseer]

Dirk,

Thanks very much for the confirmation and tips! Hopefully others will chime in with their experiences--good and/or bad.

Strangely, I feel better knowing that Xcode is not just picking on me. I read, in an Apple mailing list message, where one person called working with Xcode, "death by a thousand cuts" due to its numerous quantity of small bugs. I'm starting to agree with that statement.

Thanks!

-- Jim

[Peter S L]

I strongly recommend to read the Xcode User Guide to gain a better understanding of Xcode.

I don't know much about MS product but it's very different than CodeWarrior.

pete

[Jim Birkenseer]

Hi Pete,

I have ordered a third party book to supplement the Users Guide. Hopefully that will shed some light for me.

My biggest issue, however, is that it appears to be quite buggy. Simply clicking on a preference value (without changing anything) should not break a project. Have you had good luck building plugins with Apple's Xcode?

Thanks!

-- Jim

[Peter S L]

so far I have played with the sample code and they all works on my Intel Mac without problem.

my colleague was porting our CS2 plugin to CS3 but I didn't get to ask him the specifics with Xcode.

The problem I found with Xcode is the UI. For example, the settings GUI is very "touchy". No modified state. No "Do you want to save the changes" or "Cancel" button. You touched and that's it.

Often the same GUI will have different effects, depends on where you get the GUI such as "Project Settings" vs. "Target Settings".

"Proceed with Caution"... "Back up often" and "Ain't Broken, don't touch it" often came to mind with Xcode.

[Jim Birkenseer]

Pete,

That's a good point you make about "no modified state" in the UI. I would much rather have Save and Cancel buttons, instead of having Xcode automatically setting/changing values for me once I type something.

I also agree with your comments with regards to "Proceed with Caution". They are sad, but true.

Hopefully Xcode 3 will improve things. Sadly, I fear, that Adobe won't switch IDEs until the next version of InDesign. Maybe Xcode 3 will be an improvement, AND it will just work with IDCS3...

I didn't realize how much I liked CodeWarrior until I started using Xcode.

-- Jim

[Peter S L]

CodeWarrior has been around for over ten years plus and have been the choice of tool for Mac development. And CW was modeled after THINK C from Symantec so that would add a few additional years to that style of tool.

Basically you just so used to that IDE.

Xcode does not root from that line of tool... it's very different in terms of what it tries to accomplish for developers...

I recall there's an Xcode session from WWDC (forgot which year) available to all ADC members that described the internal thinking of Xcode. It was an eye opener to me.