Question

I realise that the view/controller stuff will be different between Mac and IPhone apps but the model code may well be similar/the same. So whats the best way to organise a project(s) so that the model code is/can be shared?

1. Copy/paste – just duplicate it and manually keep it in sync
2. Have 2 xcode projects point at the same workarea – one for Mac and one for IPhone and share the code.
3. Common library – presumably you can’t do this (or can you)

Thanks for any tips.

Answer 1

There are a few ways to do this. The first thing you can do is is create a project that builds as a framework on Mac OS X. Since you cannot use frameworks on iPhone, you can make static library target that contains the same code files. That basically works, but the header paths will be different. If you want the header paths to be the the same (i.e. <Myframework/MyFramework.h>) you will need to modify the the install path of the static library headers so that they are copied into ‘$SDK_ROOT/usr/local/include/MyFramework’, and make sure /usr/local/include is an included header search path. You will then need to install the library and headers into each SDK_ROOT.

I started out doing the above, but I found it to be a royal pain. So I ended up doing something that is a variant of #2. Basically, I get the header paths to be equivalent by making a directory named ‘Externals’ in my iPhone project root, then a directory named with the appropriate name (‘MyFramework’) in the externals folder. That is the folder I copy I drag the framework files into.Findally I add the Externals folder as a system header path (which is admittedly sort of a gross hack). You need to manually add new files to the iPhone project, but I have found that to be less of a pain the installing static libs into my build root.