Thursday, March 6, 2008

Update: I initially had stated that LLVM was the future of Apple compiler technologies. This is the case in-so-far as I believe LLVM is the future of the gcc compiler backend. This is a personal blog and I’m obviously not speaking for anyone but myself.

While watching the iPhone SDK announcement video, I noticed some odd things in my beloved Xcode. Some UI elements were looking different. And indeed, the iPhone SDK includes a new version of Xcode (and many other dev tools) which may be of interest for anyone doing Mac OS X development. Some of the highlights:

• Brand-new “New Project” and “New File” dialogs. I really like them, and the new templates make more sense.
• Multi-platform support. Each platform can provide its own set of tools and SDKs. This was obviously added to support the iPhone. So the big picture now is Platforms > SDKs > Architectures.
• Preview of gcc-4.2 and llvm-gcc-4.2. I am really excited to check this two out, particularly the LLVM powered compiler, which brings to Mac OS X developers modern link-time optimization that Microsoft Visual Studio and Intel CC customers have enjoyed for many years now. LLVM is the future of gcc compiler technologies, and it’s great to start seeing that get out into a lot of people’s hands.
• Improved support for conditional build settings (AKA per-architecture build settings).

I hope to see the final version of Xcode 3.1 to be released at this year’s WWDC, if not some manner of new beta release.

Apparently, a lot of people wanted the iPhone SDK, and for the first time that I can remember in the past 10 years, developer.apple.com died. I think it’s mostly a good thing, but it sure is making programming a little bit more tedious this evening. At least there’s the built-in documentation.

DropMPQ 0.7.1 has been released. It adds support for dropping folders on DropMPQ’s icon in Finder or the Dock.

This is a relatively small but critical update for DropMPQ. The highlights are:

• Fixed a bug in MPQKit that caused invalid MPQ archives to be created on Intel Macs.
• Added support for the bzip2 compressor and updated the compression settings for zlib and ADPCM.
• Added Sparkle for easy updating.

I was also made aware that the previous archive didn’t execute on Leopard (and in fact might have simply been corrupted), so this update also resolves that particular (and somewhat embarrassing) issue.

It should be noted that if you’ve used DropMPQ previously, the import preferences will most likely be reset because the internal format has changed significantly. Speaking of which, I’ve added additional default import settings for some new file types, including ogg, mp4, mov and smk.

Download DropMPQ 0.7.1.