Thursday, January 16, 2014

iOS Needs Frameworks

Landon Fuller:

Nearly six years later, we still don’t have a solution on-par with Mac OS X frameworks for distributing libraries, and in my experience, this has introduced unnecessary cost and complexity across the entire ecosystem of iOS development.

[…]

It’s been nearly 7 years since the introduction of iPhoneOS. iOS needs real frameworks, and moreover, iOS needs multiple-platform frameworks, with support for bundling Simulator, Device, and Mac binaries—along with their resources, headers, and related content—into a single atomic distribution bundle that applications developers can drag and drop into their projects.

Update (2014-01-29): Andrew Pontious:

The Dropbox SDK has a sample project in it which just has a single reference to the Dropbox.framework, both in the Project Navigator and in the “Link Binaries with Libraries” Xcode build phase. And while there is a custom framework search path in the project’s build settings, there’s no custom library search path or header search path. And the headers are available via the usual #import <Framework/Header.h> format.

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