7

I am trying to build a couple of apps within an XCode workspace: One app will be an iOS app and another will be a Mac OS X app. I'd like to have a certain set of classes that get included in both versions of the app. I'm struggling to figure out what kind of project structure would best support some code that is shared, some that is specific to the iOS app, and some that is specific to the Mac app. Is there a best practice for doing this kind of thing in XCode in general or XCode 4 specifically?

Should I be creating a library project for the shared code and creating 2 different targets for the iOS and Mac OS X builds of the library? The build-in project templates seem to want me to pick either a Mac OS X library or an iOS library, and I'm not sure if it's easy to make a project based on one of those templates work for both targets.

Should I instead be creating different projects for the iOS library, the Mac OS X library, the iOS app, and the Max OS X app? In this case, how can I easily have the library code shared between the iOS library and Mac OS X library projects?

Tim Dean
  • 8,253
  • 2
  • 32
  • 59

1 Answers1

4

You won't be able to make a library in the sense of a shared library file that you can link against, because code for iOS is compiled for ARM processors whereas code for OS X is compiled for Intel processors (different machine code instruction sets).

You should probably just make the code that will be shared in to a separate project and then add the project itself as a dependency.

And here's another SO question that's similar to yours about porting from one platform to the other

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Doug Stephen
  • 7,181
  • 1
  • 38
  • 46
  • Thanks for the suggestion. The post you reference mentions using a shared folder for the common code that is needed by both the library projects. Does XCode directly support a concept of shared folders, or do I need to place the classes into a separate folder and manually pull them into XCode groups? – Tim Dean Jul 06 '11 at 17:01
  • I've honestly never done this myself in XCode so I can't answer that. I'm also not currently sitting in front of my dev Mac so I can't poke around. – Doug Stephen Jul 06 '11 at 18:04