Introduction

Blipboard-iPhone is an iPhone client for Blipboard, a service that lets people sign up for or receive location-based alerts. It is a native iPhone application originally developed in the XCode 4.2 environment. It is stored as a private repository on github.

Setup

1. Install cocoapods - see http://cocoapods.org for setup instructions
2. Retrieve blipboard code from github: git clone --recursive git@github.com:aneilbaboo/blipboard-ios.git Blipboard
3. Install cocoapods: pod install
4. Open the Blipboard.xcworkspace file in XCode (do not use the Blipboard.xcproject file)

Directory and Group Structure

Wherever possible, Xcode Groups mirror the actual underlying folder structure. There are some exceptions to this, but for the majority of the code (in Blipboard/Classes), it's a 1:1 mapping.

Directory Structure: Blipboard/ - contains some miscellaneous top-level files, which are available in the Supporting Files Group. Classes/ = Blipboard/Classes group Configuration/ = Supporting Files/Configuration group - configuration files Resources/ - Blipboard/Resources group Images/ Data/ Sounds/ etc. en.lproj/ - localized settings BlipboardTests - tests DerivedData - build intermediates and products Frameworks - Frameworks group - Git submodules & included frameworks

External Libraries

We avoid git submodules as much as possible, and try to use Cocoapods whenever possible. http://cocoapods.org

Servers

Blipboard can connect to local, staging and production servers, hosted on heroku. The scheme used to build the target determines which server is used (see below).

Bundle Identifiers

In order to allow both production and staging versions of Blipboard to exist on a device at the same time, we use two different APPIDs (specified in the iOS provisioning profile):

com.blipboard.blipboard - always points at the production server com.blipboard.whistle - always points at the staging server (or localhost)

Push Notifications / Urban Airship

Adhoc and Release iOS apps interact with Apple's production APNS servers, whereas debug builds interact with Apple's development (aka sandbox) APNS servers. We have set up two Urban Airship accounts (prod, dev) which connect to Apple's production and development APNS servers, respectively.

Schemes, Configurations and Configuration Files

Blipboard uses Xcode schemes to define different build configurations. Each build configuration has a separate scheme which configures which Heroku server and which Urban Airship account is used. You should choose the appropriate action on the product menu

              Server            Urban Airship  How to Build:
              --------------    -------------  --------------

Localhost localhost:3000 dev Run Debug (Staging) staging dev Run Debug (Prod) prod dev Run Alpha staging prod Archive Beta prod prod Archive

Each scheme has a corresponding configuration and a corresponding configuration settings file:

Scheme           Configuration       Configuration Settings File
-------          --------------      ---------------------------
Localhost        Localhost           Localhost.xcconfig
Debug (Staging)  DebugStaging        DebugStaging.xcconfig
Debug (Prod)     DebugProd           DebugProd.xcconfig
Alpha            Alpha
etc.

Configurations are used by Xcode to coordinate many different settings in the project. In Blipboard, the only settings that vary between configurations are the Preprocessor Macros.

This section (in Project > Target > Build Settings) maps values in the .xcconfig files to preprocessor macros available within the Objective C code.

.xcconfig Files

Configuration settings files contain values such as:

• API keys and tokens for external services such as TestFlight, Urban Airship and Flurry
• The target name (SCHEME_TARGET_NAME)
• AppId (Bundle identifier)

Look in Shared.xcconfig for a directory of the possible configuration variables.

Problems

1. Quit Xcode
2. open Terminal in blipboard-ios5 dir
3. rm -frd Derived\ Data [4. git submodule init && git submodule update --recursive] [5. rm -frd Pods && pod install]
4. start Xcode

Step 4 is only rarely necessary (e.g., when submodules are updated) Step 5 is sometimes necessary

Run against the local static server (may be out of date)

1. Get the node.js server from git@github.com:amallavarapu/blipboard.git
2. run the static server: node test/static_server.js
3. In XCode set Scheme to Blipboard > iPhone 5.0 Simulator
4. In BBAppDelegate.m uncomment //[BBAppDelegate setBaseURL:@"http://localhost:3000"]; and comment out [BBAppDelegate setBaseURL:@"http://blipboard-staging.herokuapp.com"];
5. Product > Run