Xcode Frustration

Posted: January 2, 2012 | Categories: Mobile Development

I'm writing an article for the View on how to access Domino data from an iPhone application. My colleague Sunder Somasundaram built the application and I'm doing the write-up. While I know a bit about iOS development, Objective-C is a challenge for me (having grown up with a bunch of different development languages, Objective-C is very different than anything I've worked with in the past).

I have a Mac Mini I've been using for PhoneGap development and I've been trying for some time to upgrade my instance of Xcode. Unfortunately, Apple has switched to requiring the App Store for Xcode installation and for some bizarre reason the App Store won't install the Xcode update for me.

I signed up for the Apple iOS developer program, a requirement for access to the latest version of Xcode. When I try to install Xcode from the App Store, it tells me I can't and instead instructs me to use the software update feature to install the update. Unfortunately the software update process doesn't recognize my Xcode installation and therefore won't upgrade it.

Ugh! Why does it have to be so hard?

I searched around on the Internet and tried different things to make this work. The last thing I tried was to delete the Xcode installer file from the system's Applications folder and that did the trick. Now I'm waiting for the 1.6 GB download to complete – hopefully (no guarantee) the thing will install.

I hate, I absolutely hate, applications that insist in thinking they're smarter than me. I'm not saying I'm a genius, but when I tell an application to install, I want it to install. Perhaps I know something it doesn't (like there's a corrupt file in the current installation) and I just want the app re-installed. Don't decide for me I shouldn't be doing this, just do it – since I've told you several times that is what I want accomplished.

I'm not saying Windows is better than Macintosh OS, but at least in many cases, the Windows OS will do things I tell it to do. Not the case with Macintosh OS.

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