Making iCalMaker Universal
I have just spent the last 15 hours making iCalMaker ‘universal’.
On one hand the process, as Apple promised, has been easy. If your code-base is up to date, and doesn’t use any ‘old’ calls, then it is literally a case of clicking a few buttons.
However, things for me were not so easy, it took more than a few clicks…..
iCalMaker dates all the way back to Mac OS X 10.1, although support for 10.1 was dropped a few years ago. Since iCalMaker had been created in the 10.1 days it meant that it used the old xcode settings/features. Although this wasn’t necessarily a problem it did mean that some of the new features of xcode 2 (such as fix and test) couldn’t be used.
Having looked at the problem I decided the best thing to do was to move all the code to a ‘fresh’ project. This way I could be sure all the project settings were correct to allow a universal build and I could use some of the new xcode features. I was surprised how easy this migration was. I created a new project. Closed it down, moved in the nib files from the old project, used ‘Add to project’ to move over the code files, help system, toolbar images etc. I then reset the program details, turned on powerpc and intel compiling, and I was done.
Whilst I was doing all this ‘fiddling’ I decided to change over the esellerate sales engine to their recently released ‘web-based’ system. Three reasons for this:
- The new ‘web-based’ system looks more Mac like.
- The new system is a ‘binary’.
- PayPal has now been added as a payment option.
This was fairly straight forward and just required the removal of the old code, libraries and header files, and a swap over to the new system files. One wrinkle was I had to create an ‘embedded web’ store for the ’seller’ to use. This took some time, but was reasonably painless.
The first re-compile flagged a few problems in the code. These were mainly due to ‘old’ code from 10.1 days, which made some ‘low-level’ system calls. This was easily fixed.
The new ‘binary’ of iCalMaker is surprisingly faster than the ‘old’ powerpc version. This was noticeable when loading some rather large (several thousand entries) iCal calendars and the exporting to vcal (Palm) or text-based files.
The new version of iCalMaker also includes a number of minor fixes to iCal import and vcal export. I would like to thank users Ashley Ward, Jorge de Sousa Pires and Robert Aucoin for sharing their iCal and vcal files, which greatly helped with tracking and solving the problems.
iCalMaker is available from MMISoftware (http://www.mmisoftware.co.uk) and is a 720 kb download (http://www.mmisoftware.co.uk/downloads/icalmaker.dmg.sit) and can be bought at the MMISoftware Store. A fully functional trail version of the software is available, and an activation code can be purchased for $34.95.
