Tino's diary

Watch out Soccer Fans: LiveTabelle my latest iPhone App is available now

2011-10-17T09:31:00.000+02:00

Don't miss to look at my new iPhone App - LiveTabelle! It's available in the App Store now: http://itunes.apple.com/de/app/livetabelle/id471294860?ls=1&mt=8
More Information (in German only) at rachui-design.com

How to debug XCode Unit Tests?

2011-02-19T18:25:00.001+01:00

XCode has the necessary facilities (based on OCUnit) to easily create and execute unit tests. No doubt I want to take advantage on test driven development when developing iPhone and iPad Apps. There are two different kinds of unit tests according to Apple's documentation namely Logic tests (Unit tests in the pure sense) and Application tests (they are more to be considered system level tests).
How to set up each kind of tests for your project is documented in Apple's iOS Development Guide
Logic Tests will be executed at compile time when the target is Simulator. Application tests on the other hand will be executed when you "Build&Run" your code on the device. Sooner or later there will be the need to debug your tests. Debugging Application tests is just a matter of setting break points and "Build&Debug". Debugging Logic tests is not as easy though. There is a good description on how to get it to work anyway see How to debug iPhone Unit tests
I followed the steps mentioned in this blog post but alas it didn't work. :( So I fiddled a bit until I found the solution. Basically all the steps mentioned are correct and I'm happy I didn't had to find them myself (so a big thanks to the author!). The only thing that was incorrect were the necessary environment variables as described in section "Setting up the otest Environment". According to my investigations no only were most of them needless (at least with XCode 3.2.5 and iOS SDK 4.2) some of them turned out to be counter productive (*). To make a long story short the only environment variable that need to be set is DYLD_ROOT_PATH=$SDKROOT and you can happily debug your Logic Tests.

(*) In case you are interested: I found out which of the environment variables were problematic by setting the DYLD_PRINT_ENV environment variable (see 'man dyld') and have the dynamic linker print his environment. This way I saw that some of the paths (especially those containing spaces ;)) were incorrectly quoted.

First time at a Cocoaheads Meeting in Hamburg

2011-02-11T09:15:00.000+01:00

Unbelievable but true - I've been at a Cocoaheads meeting in Hamburg (Germany). It took place last week in the office of the Xing AG and an (for me) unexpected high number of people showed up. There was an interesting presentation about unit testing in XCode. I really looking forward to the next meeting which is scheduled for Mar. 3rd according to this page Cocoaheads Hamburg
More information about the Hamburg Cocoaheads community are here Cocoaheads Hamburg Google Group

Turning hobby into profession

2010-12-02T12:51:00.004+01:00

It's been ages since I've written here last time. I'm sure even the most loyal followers of this blog (if I've ever had some) have disappeared meanwhile. Anyhow I'm still alive at good health and fully motivated to tackle the challenges ahead.

A long time ago I started to develop on Mac in the context of the OpenOffice.org port to Mac OS X. Since that time I really fell in love developing on Mac and I even more fell in love developing for the iPhone. For quite some time I've been living basically a double life working on enterprise software developed in Java, C/C++ during my professional life and developing iPhone Apps in my free time. Now I've decided to turn what has been a hobby for so long into profession. Starting in January I'll be an iPhone/iPad developer in a fine company with excellent people in Hamburg - exciting.

Aqua Port: Drag&Drop coming soon

2008-02-05T21:19:00.000+01:00

Quite some time has passed since my last blog entry where I announced that I've completed the clipboard bridge for the Aqua port. My full-time job working on a wonderful product called Sun Ray required most of my attention in the last couple of months so there was limited time for voluntary work (yes contributing to OOo has been spare time fun for me for almost two years meanwhile ;)). But today I'm happy to let you know that I've finally managed to finished my work on the Drag&Drop implementation. I hope you'll enjoy it, it's coming (very) soon.

Mac Port: Clipboard work completed

2007-06-28T21:48:00.000+02:00

I'm happy to continue the series of good news for the Mac porting project with the announcement that I completed the implementation of the clipboard service for OOo on Mac OS X. That means that data exchange via clipboard is now possible for the most comonly used formats (e.g. Plain text, RTF, HTML, Pictures). Even OLE data exchange between OOo and MS Office works reasonably already. All changes are in module 'dtrans' of cws aquavcl01.
I hope you'll enjoy it.

OOo Mac Port - Doing 'cvs update' is incredible fun nowadays... :)

2007-05-24T21:56:00.000+02:00

...because almost every time you are doing this in 'cws aquavcl01' you get some new exciting results of the work the Mac porting team is doing. The OOo Aqua port is moving nearly at the speed of light currently.
That said - if you wanna have more fun do a 'cvs update' in module 'dtrans' and you'll get the first results of my work on the clipboard implementation for Aqua OOo. This is still work in progress though but its possible now to paste various data formats into Aqua OOo.
Have fun. :)

OOo Mac Port - cws 'macosxmapfiles' integrated into OOo 2.2

2007-02-03T19:02:00.000+01:00

Just last minute cws 'macosxmapfiles' did happily make it into OOo 2.2 (integrated into SRC680 m202). This is great but why should you care? As announced a few days ago already this cws fixes some severe exception handling issues in OOo on Mac OS X. So the effect of this cws is far-reaching. Every OOo developer and tester on Mac OS X is well-advised to re-evaluate crashes and strange issues he experienced with earlier milestones.

OOo Mac Port - Mac Intel UNO-Bridge complete, testtool is working again!

2007-01-26T20:31:00.000+01:00

Two long-standing issues bothered the Mac porting team in the last few month:

1. The UNO-Bridge for Intel Mac's did not work error-free (see #i69351#)
2. The testtool constantly crashed on Intel Mac's (#i69378#)

I'm happy to announce that with the integration of cws 'macosxmapfiles' both issues will be fixed!

But there is more to it than just that. Due to some necessary fixes in the build environment for
Mac OS X the whole installation set is now approx. 50MB smaller than before, the process
of creating shared libraries on Mac OS X is now more reliable and flexible.

This was a rather big child workspace and multiple helping hands did assist me along the way.
I'd like to thank especially Stephan Bergmann, Daniel Boelzle and Pavel Janik for their expertise
and support.

Work on the Aqua port of is going on

2006-04-25T21:49:00.000+02:00

After some slowdown in the last few weeks the work on the Aqua port of OOo will now again proceed faster. Reason for the deceleration was simply that OOo 2.0.3 deadline is close and the Mac OS X porting team decided to shift resources toward this release and do some important fixes for the PowerPC as well as for the Intel Mac version of OOo. The Aqua port certainly also benefits from this accomplishments. With OOo 2.0.3 the Intel version of OOo is in a pretty good shape and should be usable without any major problems.

Say thanks if somebody helps you!

2006-04-11T22:44:00.000+02:00

I should have mentioned in my last blog entry that Eric Bachard helped me a lot getting my first build on the new Intel Mac through. Thanks again for this Eric! Just wanted to say that.

My first Intel Mac build finished successfully

2006-04-11T20:26:00.000+02:00

Apple was so generous to donated another two Intel iMac's to the Mac OS X porting team. As announced already Stephan Schaefer and me got one. These are not only extremely beautiful machines they are also as fast as lightning and very noiseless. Thank you very very much Apple. This not only allows us to push OOo on the new Intel Macs forward but also the Aqua port in general.
My first OOo build already finished successfully on the new machine in about 5 hours - a major improvement compared to the nearly 15-20 hours needed on my iMac G5 (without ccache).

First Tiger build (m162) finished successfully

2006-04-06T07:42:00.000+02:00

Amazingly my first OOo build on Mac OS X Tiger using gcc-4.x finished without any major problems. Just one(!) easy to fix build break. Thanks to Pavel Janik for his help :) In the future my default mode will be "Pavel is right regarding build issues" ;)

So now I've got a nice 'Aqua color' OOo on my system.

I'm working on Tiger now

2006-04-04T21:15:00.000+02:00

Bye bye Panther. I finally upgraded to Tiger and started my first OOo build (m162) on Tiger using gcc-4.x. I'm curious if everything works without major problems ;)

I also upgraded to XCode 2.2 and stumbled over the problem that I could not install the developer documentation. The lapidary error message "An error occurred during installation. Please try again" is unfortunately rather useless. Neither a look into the system log nor a repair of the file access rights helped. Apple doesn't stick to their own human interface guidelines saying that error messages should also offer help to the user :(

Here we go! Tino's very first blog entry :)

2006-03-29T20:26:00.000+02:00

You surely won't call me an early adopter of this new medium called 'Blog' but over time the usefullness of this medium became more and more obvious to me. So here's another member of the fast growing blogging community ;) I will mainly use this medium to blog about my work and involvement in the Mac OS X porting project of OpenOffice.org. So people interested in this project (and I hope there are a lot out there :) get a general overview of it and my work in particular.

I hope this is of interest to others and I get a lot of constructive feedback.

Stay tuned.