I’ve recently been looking at how to set up a helper application (one that either runs all the time as a background task, or on demand, potentially with system permissions).
Apple has a few samples in this area, but they’re not all that complete, sometimes not cocoa-centric, and I found them a bit confusing.
After a fair bit of puzzling it out I’ve created my own sample (a modified version of a couple of theirs), and I’ve put it up on github in the hope that it might help someone else.
I’m very pleased to announce that Neu 1.2 is now live on the Mac App store, as well as available for download from this site.
This version has quite an extensive list of changes and improvements, including reorganised preferences, some new substitutions, and a substantial overhaul of the main UI.
Check out the release notes for full details.
Ambientweet 1.0.2 is now available from the Mac Application store.
This is a minor revision, with a fix to a bug that caused it to stall and stop refreshing tweets after an hour or so.
Let’s say that you are building with a modern SDK, but you are targeting some older platforms. For example, you’re using the iOS 5.0 SDK, but you want your app to run on iOS 4.2.
When you do this, you have to take care not to call routines which are only implemented on iOS 5. You can set your deployment target to 4.2, but that won’t prevent you from calling 5-only routines, they will simply be weak linked and will be nil on platforms that don’t support them.
Occasionally I slip up on this, and during testing I discover that I’m using a routine that doesn’t exist everywhere.
The simple solution when this happens is to stop using the routine in question, and find some workaround, but that’s a bit rubbish. After all, the routine has probably been added precisely because it’s useful.
Also, the routine, when it does exist, might be better than your workaround. Apple wrote it, so it must be good right? So you’d prefer to only use the workaround where necessary.
Finally, this is a temporary problem that will probably go away at some point. The routine is present on new systems, and eventually time will move on and you’ll stop supporting the ones where it is missing.
So rather than changing your code, how about finding a way to add the missing implementation when necessary? Luckily, Objective C is wonderfully dynamic, so this is entirely feasible.
Apple’s bug reporting system (imaginatively called Apple Bug Reporter to the outside world, but known as Radar internally I believe), is essentially closed.
What this means is that you can’t check up on a bug that you didn’t originate, you can’t share your bug report with other developers for testing, discussion or corroboration, and you can’t search for existing or similar issues.
This really really sucks.