So I recently updated my iPhone to iOS5.  Its a 3GS … so it was less than exciting to see the end result.  Yea, there are some GUI enhancements, but nothing really worth the trouble its causing now.  What trouble?  When you build an app using XCode, and you want to deploy it to your iPhone for testing purposes, the OS on your phone MUST match the SDK on your system.

So I’m plugging along building and testing 2 apps in the simulator, they’re working great.  I decided I’m to the point where I’d like to test them on my phone, so I fire up XCode (4.1 to something) and got a nice little message that said something like the Operating system on your device does not match the SDK version on this machine.  Click here to revert the device … WHAT?  Heck no.  So that mean I now have to go through the pain of updaing XCode.

This has happened multiple times to me as I’ve progressed up through OS versions on my phone, so this time I figured I’d document it – so next time its not so much guess work, and it might help someone else too.

• Download XCode : Log into your developer account at http://developer.apple.com click downloads, and download the latest SDK version (4.2 includes iOS5 SDK)
• Install XCode.  This can take a while, so grab a book or make a sandwich.  DON’T listen to music on iTunes, because that’ll have to be closed during this upgrade.

If you’re developing with Rhodes (http://rhomobile.com) you might possibly have to upgrade this as well.  Since you have your sandwich and a drink, you might as well.

Rhodes Upgrade (optional)

From a terminal prompt

• sudo gem update rhodes
• rhodes-setup
• set-rhodes-sdk (from your application’s root folder)
• rake clean:iphone

If you get an error like this -

=== CLEAN NATIVE TARGET rhorubylib OF PROJECT rhorubylib WITH CONFIGURATION Distribution ===
Check dependencies
Unsupported compiler 'GCC 4.2' selected for architecture 'i386'

Welcome to the club.

It seems that XCode 4.2 removes the older 4.x simulators.  I found this out when I opened XCode trying to debug the message above, and there was only iPhone Simulator 5.0 listed.  So to fix the error above, you much edit your build.yml file and set these lines -

Code it right
theCodeDog

If you ‘play’ around in XCode, chances are you’ve seen this “Base SDK Missing” message in your project.  This happens to me almost every time I try to use someone else’s sample project or demo app I’ve pulled, even sample apps from Apple.

There are two things you can check / change to make this go away and allow you to build your project :

Project | Edit Project Settings | General tab

- look at the Base SDK for all Configurations setting near the bottom of that screen – chances are it’ll be set to a version you do not have installed for one reason or another. Set it to iPhone Simulator 4.0 (or whatever version you have)

- this will also fix any missing libraries that display in red in your project files when the sdk is missing.

Now change to the Build tab (sometimes this works** see further below if it doesn’t)

- Look at the Base SDK – and if it does not match the option you set above, change it (iPhone Simulator 4.0)

** I think last time I did this, it actually did list iPhone Simulator on the build tab and I STILL saw the missing SDK message.

If after doing the above, you still see the Base SDK Missing message do this as well -

Project | Edit Active Target “yourAppName” | Build tab

- change Base SDK on that screen to iPhoneSimulator 4.0 – apparently these settings are separate configs.

This should now add a base sdk to your project dropdown, any missing libraries will now be linked and you’ll be able to build your app.

One further Note – obviously if you’re wanting or needing 4.1 or greater – set it to that instead of iPhone Simulator 4.0

-Jon

Code it right
theCodeDog