Upgrade to XCode 4.1 - problems with VALID_ARCHS for iOS Simulator builds

Now that I've taken the plunge and moved to XCode 4.x from XCode 3.x ... I had a really weird problem trying to build my iOS projects for the simulator.

The builds failed with an error related to the i386 architecture. I simply couldn't figure-out how to solve this directly with the XCode IDE.

Luckily, I did manage to figure-out a fix: my solution was to edit the project.pbxproj files by hand with vim, and remove a handul of fixed definitions of VALID_ARCHS ... which presumably were legacies from previous XCode versions. This is not the first time that I've been forced to fix XCode projects by hand!

Mac - how to build installs the easy way

I was having some issues getting my Mac installers (using packagemaker) working with the latest XCode.

Surfing-around, I found an amazing free tool called Packages. The link is here:

http://s.sudre.free.fr/Software/Packages/about.html

I've changed our own installers to use this, and all my Mac install problems have disappeared with an hours work. :)

Pete

Audio and MIDI Visualization in iOS and Android

I've spent the past month focused mainly on Intermorphic's Audio/MIDI visualizer framework, dusting-down the work I did (in the main) several years ago, and bringing it all up-to-date.

I've recently experimented with lots of stuff, 2D and 3D, on iOS (UIKit ,Quartz, Core Animation and OpenGL ES) and Android (Canvas and OpenGL ES), and have learned a lot about performance differences between these approaches. I've also learned that OpenGL ES is a truly horrible API in which to get things done. :)

Anyways - things are coming on nicely: the next update for Mixtikl should be another good one!

Android - turn key events into UTF8

As I've been asked a few times how to turn Android key events into UTF8 data, I figured it might be a good idea to share this info in my blog! It is actually really easy:

  @Override
  public boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent event) {
    int [] unicodePoints = new int[1];
    unicodePoints[0] = event.getUnicodeChar();
    String x = new String(unicodePoints, 0, 1);
    byte utf8Bytes[];
    try {
      utf8Bytes = x.getBytes("UTF-8");
      // Do something with your UTF-8 data here!
      // ....
      // ...
    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
      Log.e(TAG, "Failed to key event to UTF8");
      Throw(e);
    }
    return true;
  }