lauerman.dev

Hand-making an iOS App (part 2)

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post, I walked through the process of building a simple app that can be run in the simulator using only C, shell scripting, and the Xcode command-line tools. We learned about cross-compilation, the structure of an application bundle, and how to use the simctl command to automate installing and launching the app. This is no small feat!

However, we’re still a long way from a “real” app. In this post, we’ll learn about entitlements, certificates, and provisioning profiles in order to get our app running on real hardware.

Hand-making an iOS App (part 1)

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

If you’re an iOS developer, you likely use Xcode to do the vast majority of your development work. Xcode makes it as easy as possible to get an app up and running, especially for beginners. Plus, with addition of tightly-integrated IDE features like SwiftUI previews and inline macro expansion, you’d have little reason to want to use anything else.

But have you ever stopped to consider how Xcode does some of the things it does? I’m not talking about the aforementioned IDE features, I mean the basic stuff, like: