Chomer.com

Well, I’ve started to mess around with Cloudkit. And, before I could get out of the gate, before I could write a line of useful code, I ran into some troubles. These are probably due to my unique quirky circumstances. But then again, there are probably a small handful of developers who may have run into some of these problems and perhaps my blunders and lessons learned may be of help to you.

First of all, the Cloudkit Dashboard only “kind of” worked.

• First problem here: I created my developer Apple Id a long long time ago when it could be anything (as long as someone else didn’t have it already).
  • Now, various Apple tools want your Apple Id to be a valid email address. Mine was not an email address! Never had been!
  • First of all, I created a new Gmail account just for my Apple Development work.
  • Then I had to figure out the process for changing my Apple Id. I dreaded that I would have to re-log into everything, and have things blowing up left and right. It turns out the process was not that scary and I did not have to re-log into everything! Phew!
  • The nasty messages about needing to have my Apple Id be an email address went away.
• Second Problem: my iCloud log on.
  • When trying to access the private database in my project’s container, it said that I wasn’t logged into iCloud. But I was logged in! I checked!
  • It turned out that I couldn’t just be logged in with any old log in. The iCloud log in in my System Preferences had to be the same as my developer log in. What a pain! But, once I changed that, all of a sudden things started working…
    • On the Cloudkit Dashboard, I created a new record type in my private db, added a couple fields to it, and added a couple indexes to it to boot!

For now, on my Mac, I’ve set up a separate developer log on. If that’s what I need to do to get things to work that is what I will do. There is still a bunch of other things I need to set up on this new user account to make it usable for more than opening Xcode and building apps.

I’d rather have a spot in Xcode where I could log into iCloud just for the apps I’m building. Perhaps it’s there? Am I missing something? If you know something that I don’t leave a comment below.