Posts by jldavid

Setting Up Titanium Studio 1.0.9, Xcode 4.3.2 & iOS 5.1 SDK

Posted by jldavid on Mar 26, 2012

Here are the updated instructions for setting up the latest iOS development environment for Titanium Studio (it’s essentially a quick follow up to my two previous blog posts).

1. Update to the latest MacOS - currently Lion. Some new SDKs require the latest operating system as a pre-requisite.
2. Optional – uninstall previous versions of Xcode. The command line instruction to do this is:
   sudo /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools -mode=all
3. Optional – uninstall or update  Titanium Studio. Instructions are found here: https://wiki.appcelerator.org/display/tis/Uninstalling+Studio
4. Download & install Xcode 4.3.2 & iOS 5.1 SDK. Available as a .dmg file here: https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action
5. Download & install Titanium (latest version 1.0.9). The latest .dmg is available here: http://titanium-studio.s3.amazonaws.com/latest/Titanium%20Studio.dmg
6. Download & install the Mobile SDK (the recommended stable version is the latest from the Master branch – currently mobilesdk-2.0.0.v20120326211803-osx.zip): http://builds.appcelerator.com.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html. To install the SDK,  simply click on the Help > Install Titanium SDK from URL option within the Titanium Studio IDE. Some prefer to use other builds for speed, functionality & stability benefits
7. *Install Xcode 4.3.1 command line tools - from “Xcode -> Preferences -> Downloads”. *Instructions derived from the following blog post by the Appcelerator team: http://developer.appcelerator.com/blog/2012/03/titanium-and-xcode-4-3-revisited.html
8. *Run this command:
   sudo xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer
9. *Download and extract the following file –  ios-sim-xcode4.3.tar.gz
10. *Copy the ios-sim executable to any Titanium SDK paths you are using. For example:
    ~/Library/Application Support/Titanium/mobilesdk/osx/1.8.1/iphone/
11. Create a default project & deploy it to the simulator. This will test whether Titanium Studio “recognizes” your Xcode install & whether your certificates are still working.

Good luck!

Troubleshooting Appcelerator Titanium and iPhone iOS 5.1

Posted by jldavid on Mar 23, 2012

Update: Appcelerator’s official recommendation dated March 16th is to either downgrade to Xcode v.4.2.1 or living on the edge with Xcode 4.3 (via Mitch Amihod)

Tried to deploy a default Titanium app targeting the iPhone iOS 4.2 onto a physical device with iOS 5.1 installed. As you could probably guess, the app installed on the device as expected but when launched, it would crash after the splash screen.

The trouble is that I had the iOS 4.2 SDK installed. I tried to install the IOS 5.1 SDK, but unfortunately Titanium Studio would only recognize the iOS 3.0, 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2 SDKs. I tried to re-target Titanium Studio to recognize the iOS 5.1 SDK, but to no avail – iOS 5.1 would not show up as an option no matter what. After doing some digging around, I found a file called builder.py in the Titanium Studio application path that had a command called -showsdks (at line 50) which provides the Titanium Studio IDE with the list of targetable platforms. For example:

I typed in the command in Terminal and got the following result:

After a few hours of troubleshooting, I discovered the trick was to pretty much uninstall all previous versions of Xcode. The command to do this is:

Then when you open Titanium Studio, the following message appears:

I decided to install the following components:

• Xcode 4.2 for Lion (build 4D199 with the iOS 5 SDK Gold Master build) which was the recommended build by the Titanium team – available at the following link (requires an iOS Developer Program account): https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action#. After the install, the iOS 5.0 SDK came up as an target option in the Titanium Studio IDE (and via xcodebuild -showsdks)
• Appcelerator 1.7.6 Mobile SDK – found on the continuous builds website (http://builds.appcelerator.com.s3.amazonaws.com). The later 1.7.x builds are recommended for use with the iOS 5+ SDKs. To install the mobile SDK, simply click on the Help > Install Titanium SDK from URL option within the Titanium Studio IDE. The URL I used was: http://builds.appcelerator.com.s3.amazonaws.com/mobile/1_7_X/mobilesdk-1.7.6.v20120320183239-osx.zip

To test out the new install (and crossing my fingers), I created a new blank Titanium mobile project targeting the Appcelerator 1.7.6 SDK. When deploying the app to my iPhone, I selected the iOS 5 SDK as a compile target. The app deployed to my phone, and lo and behold, it worked! Hope the instructions are helpful for you too.

If you want clarity on what Xcode version contains what iOS SDK version (which can get quite convoluted when you try to explain it out loud), here is a Wikipedia entry to hopefully help clear things up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_SDK

Setting Up Appcelerator Titanium for iPhone Development in 4 Easy Steps

Posted by jldavid on Mar 22, 2012

One of the most common tasks when developing iPhone apps is to set up your environment in order to deploy your apps directly to a device (it’s always an exciting moment to see your app run on a phone for the first time!). If you don’t do it every day, it’s easy to forget the steps, especially as there are certificates involved. As a reminder for future reference (and to hopefully help some people out there), here are the steps I like to follow:

1) Make sure that your environment is up to date: The most recent version of Xcode and iOS SDKs require the latest Mac operating systems. Upgrade to Lion (pro-tip: once you buy MacOSX Lion, you can upgrade every device that you own). Get all the security updates for Lion. Update to the latest version of iTunes, Xcode and iOS SDK.

Update: As Mitch Amihod pointed out, Appcelerator’s official recommendation dated March 16th is to either downgrade to Xcode v.4.2.1 or living on the edge with Xcode 4.3 (which doesn’t contradict my recommendation to use Xcode 4.2 w/ iOS 5.0 SDK). If I encounter any problems, I’ll have to test out Xcode 4.2.1.

2) Clean up your Apple development certificates. Once you become a member of the Apple iOS Developer Program, you can access the iOS Provisioning portal and create development certificates for both Xcode and Titanium Studio. What commonly happens is that you’ll create development certificates that you will not use right away, and they will get invalidated over time. If you try to use these old expired certificates, you’ll get all sorts of error messages trying to deploy apps to your iPhone. Here are the steps to clean up your certificates (originally posted on StackOverflow):

• Close all applications, except your web page logged into the iOS Provisioning Portal.
• Open Xcode. Click on the Window > Organizer option, and select “Provisioning Profiles” on the left. This should bring up your provisioning profiles.
• Highlight all your developer profiles, right click and delete them.
• Go back to the browser to the iOS Provisioning Portal (don’t use the “Launch Assistant” just yet).
• Click on Certificates at the left. You will probably have just one line listed with your name/company. Click on Revoke, then click OK to verify.
• Click on Devices. Select all the devices you want to remover, then click OK to verify.
• Wait about two minutes to let Apple to refresh their server backend.
• Click on Home on the left side navigation.
• Click on “Launch Assistant“
• Create a new application ID – call it whatever you want, just make it unique & avoid using IDs you’ve used in the past (important).
• Follow the instructions provided by the Assistant wizard till the end. The main thing you accomplished was deleting your old provision profiles and start over fresh – doing so will make the deployment process less prone to mess up.

3. Add your .mobileprovision certificate to Titanium Studio. A lot of people get messed up by this step – when you launch your app to a device in Titanium Studio, this screen will appear:

Despite what it says, ignore the “Register your iOS device with Apple” and “Obtain Development Provisioning Profile from Apple” steps – you’ve already done both using the Launch Assistant on the iOS Provisioning Portal in step 2! Click on the blue “Upload” link next to “Upload Development Provisioning Profile” and select the .mobileprovision developer certificate you generated & downloaded in step 2 (as instructed by the Launch Assistant). This is quite confusing step – let’s hope the Titanium team cleans up this UI in a future release of the IDE!

4. Configure and set up iTunes. Titanium Studio uses iTunes sync to transfer your custom apps to your iPhone. In order to get it working correctly, you need to set up the Sync Apps option (which will synchronize all your iPhone apps with your development computer). The kicker is that if your development environment isn’t one of your computers you authorized with iTunes, you run the risk of losing & having to redownload/organize apps on your iPhone. To avoid this, select File > Transfer Purchases from “x iPhone”  to backup your apps .ipa files.

Be sure to read part 2 of this blog post “Troubleshooting Appcelerator Titanium and iPhone iOS 5.1” to learn what SDK bits to install to properly set your dev environment!

No Harmony Link Devices Found with Logitech Revue

Posted by jldavid on Mar 7, 2012

I just got a new Logitech Revue with Google TV – one of the cool features is the ability to control the device using your iPhone or iPad. I downloaded the Harmony Link application from the Canadian iTunes store, then encountered the following error: “No Harmony Link devices found”. After a little digging around, I solved the problem – here is the solution:

• Make sure you install the Logitech Harmony® for Logitech Revue™ app, found in the U.S. iTunes app store, not the Logitech Harmony® Link app found in the Canadian/non-U.S. iTunes store. The Logitech Harmony® for Logitech Revue™ app will not show up in the Canadian store, and Logitech Harmony® Link is incompatible with the Revue. If you have any doubts, the application icon looks like this:

• Second thing, make sure both your Google TV and iPhone/iPad are connected to the same local wifi network. Note that if your Google TV is connected to the network using both an ethernet and wifi connection, the ethernet connection will take precedence and your Apple device won’t be able to find your Google TV. The same issue will occur if your router is too locked down, preventing devices on the network to “talk” to each other. The process of connecting to your Logitech Revue should only take a second.

Unable to Verify Server Information Error Connecting Your iPhone to mail.microsoftonline.com

Posted by jldavid on Feb 6, 2012

I was hitting my head against the wall trying to connect my iPhone to Hosted Exchange – found the answer in this forum post. Here are the correct steps for making a successful connection:

• Click on Settings
• Select “Mail, Contacts, Calendar”
• Click on “Add Account…”
• Select Microsoft Exchange
• Enter your username, password and email, leave the domain blank (unless you specifically need to use it)
• Click on Next at the top right
• A server field will appear – if you are in North America, your first instinct will be to add the following URL as indicated in the documentation “https://red001.mail.microsoftonline.com” (if you are not in North America, you can find your server here). If you do, you’ll repeatedly get the “Unable to Verify Server Information” error.
• The correct server URL to use with the iPhone is “Red001.mail.microsoftonline.com”. It’s critical that you omit the “https://” and Red001 starts with a capital R (as documented here).

Good luck!