I’ve found that when you upgrade versions of XCode, that you lose the ability to compile against older SDK’s (and therefore, the ability to make a binary targeted for the older platforms). This is further annoying by the fact that every sample project that you download from Apple that is slightly older (by that I mean 6 months), you have to go in and “Edit Project Settings” to change the SDK from “4.0 Missing” to “iOS 4.3” before you can build/compile, install to device, or even run the App (I’m not complaining — a missing SDK is surely something worthy in commanding such manual intervention but — If you’re loading up over 200 sample apps from Apple, it gets quite tedious having to modify each project before being able to install it to the device).
I found the solution to all this, and you’ll be surprised at how much work Apple makes us do in order to maintain backward compatibility. This problem had me on the ropes for 2 weeks while I tried to figure out how to — with *either* the new XCode 4 or the still-offered legacy XCode 3.2.6 (both released last month) — compile ANY code for my iPhone 3G which — due to Apple’s decisioning — cannot update to the latest iOS. Without the below solution, I would not be able to compile code for the iPhone 3G without downgrading XCode. However, with the below solution, I can use the latest and greatest XCode with the older SDKs to compile code for the older devices.
Step 1: Stay up to date, but make backups!
Whenever Apple issues a new XCode installer, that installer only comes with the SDKs that they want to provide you. Currently, that’s only iOS 4.3 (note: the Device SDK is different than the Simulator SDK). Running said installer will wipe-out any existing old SDKs, leaving you only with what they have provided you in the latest installer. This is certainly cause for alarm, because if your device doesn’t use one of the provided SDKs, you cannot publish for that device. However, there are no rules for the AppStore that says you must baseline your app to a specific SDK, so whatever baseline you want to choose is fine with Apple — as long as it runs smoothly on the Device SDKs that Apple will test your App against.
Naturally, you’ll want to prevent the loss of any existing older SDKs before you install. Go to the Finder (by clicking the “Finder” icon in the Dock, or clicking the desktop background image, for example), and then select from the menubar Go->Go To Folder… (or simply press Apple+Shift+G). This will bring up a dialog prompt allowing you to go to a directory based on UNIX pathname. Enter the text “/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs” (without quotes) and press ENTER (aka return). This will open the directory where the SDKs are installed. Before installing the latest XCode Developer Tools from Apple, backup everything in this directory.
Step 2: If you want to install additional SDKs (one’s that you don’t have).
Visit this webpage to find links to the old Developer Tools.
NOTE: We’re not going to be installing these developer tools, but rather we’ll rip-open the images and pluck out only the SDK information (not XCode and associated developer tools such as gcc and friends).
http://iphonesdkdev.blogspot.com/2010/04/old-versions-of-iphone-sdk.html
Once you’ve downloaded the SDK, it should automatically mount on your desktop (if you’re using Safari anyway) as a disk image named “Xcode and iPhone SDK”. Within this disk image is a hidden directory named “Packages”. Since it is hidden, the simplest way to access this directory is to once-again use the Go->Go To Folder… menubar item (or press Apple+Shift+G), entering “/Volumes/Xcode and iPhone SDK/Packages” (without quotes) and pressing ENTER. This will allow you to browse the hidden “Packages” directory on the read-only disk image containing the Developer Tools. Within this directory are files named similar to:
iPhoneSDK3_0.pkg
iPhoneSDK3_1_2.pkg
iPhoneSDK3_1_3.pkg
iPhoneSDK3_1.pkg
iPhoneSDK3_2.pkg
iPhoneSDK4_0.pkg
…ad nauseum. Go ahead and double-click any of these “*.pkg” files to launch the SDK installer (which will install ONLY to the directory “/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs”.
As you launch the Installer, be aware that we’ll have to make some adjustments to allow the installation to occur. When prompted to select the target installation disk (immediately after clicking “Continue” on the initial dialog) click the hard disk that you want to install to (even if it’s already highlighted) to cause a “Choose Folder…” button to appear. Click the “Choose Folder…” button and pick somewhere that is writable as you (if you attempt to install to the default location, the installation will fail — because the installer did not pre-authenticate with root privileges as is done in the main-installer opposed to these sub-installers). I chose to make a new directory on my Desktop. After the installation is complete, you should have a “Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/{version}” directory in the target installation directory that you chose. This “{version}” directory will need to be plucked from where you installed it and dropped into the “/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/SDKs/” directory.
Once you’ve installed a new SDK, you’ll need to restart XCode.
Immediately after installing the device SDK required by any Apple Sample code and restarting XCode, you’ll then be able to simply select “Device” from the arch menu (at the top-left of the project window), and press Apple+R to run the app on your connected device. No more need to go into the project settings to change the default SDK (sometimes needs to be done for each sub-target) to one that exists.
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Happy coding,
Devin Teske