Best way to share iphone and mac code between projects

Question

Hi,

I realise that the view/controller stuff will be different between Mac and IPhone apps but the model code may well be similar/the same. So whats the best way to organise a project(s) so that the model code is/can be shared?

1. Copy/paste - just duplicate it and manually keep it in sync
2. Have 2 xcode projects point at the same workarea - one for Mac and one for IPhone and share the code.
3. Common library - presumably you can't do this (or can you)

Thanks for any tips.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if the suggestion from the previous answer would work. If you look at my previous question, you'll see that I've failed to load a custom framework on the iPhone even though the framework works fine on Mac.

I would go with method 2.

Answer 2

There are a few ways to do this. The first thing you can do is is create a project that builds as a framework on Mac OS X. Since you cannot use frameworks on iPhone, you can make static library target that contains the same code files. That basically works, but the header paths will be different. If you want the header paths to be the the same (i.e. <Myframework/MyFramework.h>) you will need to modify the the install path of the static library headers so that they are copied into "$SDK_ROOT/usr/local/include/MyFramework", and make sure /usr/local/include is an included header search path. You will then need to install the library and headers into each SDK_ROOT.

I started out doing the above, but I found it to be a royal pain. So I ended up doing something that is a variant of #2. Basically, I get the header paths to be equivalent by making a directory named "Externals" in my iPhone project root, then a directory named with the appropriate name ("MyFramework") in the externals folder. That is the folder I copy I drag the framework files into.Findally I add the Externals folder as a system header path (which is admittedly sort of a gross hack). You need to manually add new files to the iPhone project, but I have found that to be less of a pain the installing static libs into my build root.

Answer 3

You could develop your application in JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. You would use the WebView and UIWebView objects on the Mac and the iPhone respectively. You can do pretty much anything you want in the WebView objects, even make calls down to Objective-C.

The QuickConnectiPhone installer, found here https://sourceforge.net/projects/quickconnect/, installs QuickConnectMac and QuickConnectiPhone templates into Xcode.

This way you can quickly create an application in one environment and then migrate the view to the other. In fact the QuickConnect framework is highly modular.

If you don't want to develop in JavaScript the same modular framework is found on the Objective-C side of the templates installed.

It should make it much easier for you to do what you are attempting.