I have been working my way through the Stanford iOS programming course. It’s been my biggest exposure to the Apple developer ecosystem. So far I have encountered three user interface components in the tooling that I trip me up. The first is Interface Builder (IB). This tool is separate from the XCode IDE. I typically forget to save changes. In my mind XCode and IB are one and so I expect my changes to be saved when I build. I usually end up with a blank screen and then I remember: save in IB! In XCode 4 IB is supposed to be integrated so hopefully this issue is fixed. On the code side of things all the UI pointers are nil. In Objective C it is perfectly valid to send messages to those nil objects. Personally, I would like to fail fast and have the program crash as I think that would help me find the root cause quicker. Second, when opening older projects I often get the “Base SDK is missing” error. It’s easy to change in the project’s build settings but after the change it seems you must reload the project in XCode. It wasn’t entirely obvious at first but restarting an application usually fixes everything regardless of the platform. Finally, I wanted to see how my custom drawRect: code was visually different on the retina display versus the old display. I checked out an older device from work and took it too my office and tried to provision only to receive this error message:

Only one developer gets to register a device I figured. I searched the internet a bit and finally decided I would just provision the device as a tester’s device. While I was looking for the page to do that I found my device list had two devices listed. That was odd because I only expected to see my iPod listed. I looked at the second device and sure enough it had the same ID number as the device I had checked out. The dialog meant to add devices didn’t tell me it had done this. It only displayed an error message asking for another ID number. Overall the tooling is pretty good and it does not get in the way that often.