Category Archives: XCode

Cloudkit Fussiness in Xcode

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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.

XCode Context Sensitive Help is Broke Worse (is that good English?)

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I’ve been living with this problem a little awhile now. This problem was introduced with the last upgrade of Xcode:    Version 10.0 (10A255).

Help comes up for sure. Always has for me. I move my mouse over something like a class name that is part of Apple’s eco-system, like (for example): SKAction… I hold down the Option key of my keyboard… the mouse icon turns into a nifty bold question mark… I left mouse-click… a popup comes up… I click the Open in Developer Documentation link at the bottom of the popup… and Behold!   A window pops up about SKAction!

But there is this tree control on the left side of the window… you know the one that I mean… and SKAction is not highlighted in it! This is annoying because by expanding the SKAction node in this tree control (for example), I can see all the methods that belong to this class. And, if I click on one of those method names, then I see the help for it. And that obviously is really handy!

This used to work. Except, when you had help up from a previous search, then whatever you had selected from a previous search would be highlighted (even though the content on the right hand side of the window would be correct).  Annoying, but no problem: I would just close the documentation window and re-do the [Option]-click, and the item I had picked would be properly highlighted in the tree! And I could explore all the related items to my heart’s content.

The past problem was slightly annoying. This problem is Really annoying!

Another annoying problem:  If you pick an option in Objective C, it brings up the help for Swift.  If the context is Swift, it should display the help for Swift, if the context is Objective C, the help for Objective C!  I know, all I need to do is click the [Objective C] link on the page… but this is supposed to be contextual help!

Hopefully devs have been complaining and this will be fixed the next release. It just slows me down. So I am blowing off a little bit of steam by writing this post. 🙂