How exactly filling bugs for the iPhone SDK with Apple works?
I've always seen people mentioning we should fill bugs and duplicates is their way of measuring priority, but it's not clear to me:
How to actually fill the bug;
How to flag someone else's bug as a duplicate, and;
What do I need to tell people I've filled that bug and they should help me get it fixed by posting duplicates, if they're interested.
I couldn't find this process detailed anywhere - just snippets of information, so I figure you guys could help me (and all other developers fresh in Cocoa / Cocoa-touch development) by detailing it here.
Thanks!
File bugs at http://bugreport.apple.com/. After you have filed a bug at bugreporter, it helps to post it to http://openradar.me/ (not operated by Apple). It's also very useful to search against for duplicates to file against bugreporter. Not everyone uses openradar so it's not comprehensive.
The only thing in your control is actually #1, that is you can file bugs. You can do this through http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/ for all of Apple's products including the SDK IIRC.
Your other two points are not so easy since you can only see your bugs. You will just have to trust that when Apple runs them through triage that thy properly flag duplicates. Some people do include the Radar url for their bug when positing n to the mailing lists and the like. That URL only works for Apple employees, but the hope is that if you make it easy to find your bug it might get fixed sooner.
Related
The topic says it all. I've got a .app file here, but the Xcode project is no longer available to me. Is there any way to take the .app file and reverse engineer an Xcode project from it so I can view the code used to make it?
First, the source code is signed and encrypted.
Second, you're likely legally not allowed to decrypt this source if you are in the United States, Cuba, North Korea and many other countries. I fear it even applies to your own code, since it was encrypted by Apple tools, with an Apple key. Check this with a lawyer, guy in black with scary words and a nice Porsche.
Third, Objective-C being a compiled language, and LLVM allowing you to do some optimization, you would have a real hard time going back to anything slightly readable. This is no Java/C#.
Four, you'd better be really, really sure that "the app file is no longer available to me" means you have a legal right to the source in some way. Stealing source code carries some hefty penalties, with fines you can buy yourself a Porsche with. Ask a lawyer :p
By design this cannot be done. The best you can do is run the app and try to reverse engineer it based on functionality. Stealing the source code is a no-no (and not just because Apple says so).
It would be very very difficult. There's no one click solution. However, you could look at class-dump and otool. Just be aware that it's a very manual effort, you'll still be piecing everything together yourself.
When you say "the Xcode project is no longer available to me" then I would assume you have written the code or at least have seen it.
It will be definitely much faster to rewrite it than to try to decompile it.
I discovered this:
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/qa/qa2010/qa1686.html
Since this was incredible useful for me and never found anywhere else, I wonder which other top secret informations are available in such "hidden" answer-documents?!
I wasn't able to find the root directory that lists all of them. Is there a way to browse all those frequently asked questions and answers, or is it a matter of great luck to stumble upon one of these?
Links to Technical Q&As and Technical Notes can be found on the left bar in the iOS Reference Library Page...
It seems a lot to ask, but I'm looking for a cloud-based solution to managing code snippets. I am looking for:
Tags
User accounts (I want to be able to see all of my snippets on a single page)
syntax highlighting
versioning - myself or others should be able to edit my snippets to improve them and have revisions save so that I can go back and use an older version if I prefer.
straightforward UI with minimal advertising if any
Does anyone know of a solution which meets these requirements? If not, would anyone be interested in something like this? As a software engineer, after step zero (does it already exist), I'm perfectly willing to go onto step 1 (would other people use it? If so, make it).
www.codebarrel.com
it has everything you asked for
Sounds like Gist.
http://gist.github.com/
Except for the tags part. But it might be workable anyway.
I'm working on a site for this. The very rough (as in: barely works, but not even functional yet) initial version is here: https://github.com/jasongrout/snippets
What's the best way to get started using Popcap's "SexyApp Framework", and is it a good idea?
Wikipedia article
I'll take a (potential) Necromancer badge, even though you've (likely) already found your answer ... or went with SDL.
So, the developer.popcap.com is still active, although you won't find anything (like, say, docs) there.
Thankfully, you can still get it on popcapframework.sourceforge.net, which has all the installation guides, docs, etc.
It's been more than two years, but, hey, at least you got the answer. :)
Is there a quick-reference guide to the iPhone SDK that's as fast and easy to use as one of those little O'Reilly books, or JavaDoc?
I'm new to iPhone SDK programming. I need reference material. Let's say I want to know if the string class has a "reverse" function. For Java I go to http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/ and browse down to find "String". Then I can see everything about String, with hyperlinks to Serializable and Character. I don't see a "reverse" method, but look, there's a hyperlink to StringBuilder -- aha, there's StringBuilder.reverse(). Total elapsed time 30 seconds.
For the iPhone I go to http://developer.apple.com/iphone and log in. Everything seems to be slower here. There are fewer cross-links than in the Java documentation, and each link seems to pull in a big page that takes a long time to load. Just the page for NSString takes 30 seconds to load fully. Maybe I just don't know my way around the documentation yet, but it seems to be much harder to browse for what you want. There's no equivalent of flipping through a book, or if there is it takes 30 seconds to turn the page.
The iPhone platform is immense -- for almost anything you'd want to do, there's got to be a class somewhere that does it. The built-in help in XCode is good but I'm still lost with it.
How do YOU go about finding that class you need? Is there a better way?
I just use XCode's built-in help system. Right-click a class or symbol name, and choose "Find Selected Text in API Reference". You can also do "Jump to Definition", which will open the header file where that symbol is defined.
More info on this stuff here.
When I started with iPhone dev I used the iPhone Developers Cookbook, it has examples of how to do specific things. It's easy to pick out one piece of functionality to try out.
I'd highly recommend checking it out.
Use the XCode hot keys to jump to documentation on anything - in XCode for Leopard, you can double-click on something like "NSString" while holding down "Option" and it will take you to the documentation for that class. You can do the same thing for method names.
In Snow Leopard that key combo opens up a little help box with a summary of what you clicked on, "Cmd-Option double-click" brings up the docs as with Leopard.
The built in docs are very good and even provide links to sample code (if any exists for the subject in question).
There's also a way to generate your own XCode compatible documentation with Doxygen, just like you could with Javadoc:
http://developer.apple.com/tools/creatingdocsetswithdoxygen.html
If the speed of browsing documentation is the issue, I recommend downloading the related doc sets and browse them locally in Xcode. In Xcode's preferences, select the last "tab" (Documentation) and click the "GET" button next to the documentation test you want. (I'm on Snow Leopard and Xcode 3.2, but it should be similar on Xcode 3.1.x as well.)
If finding what you need is the issue, I second #paulsnotes's answer — the "cookbook" approach is very helpful form a task-based exploration standpoint. Also, when you find something you were looking for, and it took much longer than usual, provide feedback on Apple's documentation. Each page has links at the bottom. You can suggest what classes, sample code, etc. would be useful to cross-link to make it easier to find what you need.
If we are recommeding books, this is excellent for a beginner, it gets you up to speed very quickly while leading you through creating highly functional apps you can use as a jumping point for your own:
Beginning Iphone Development