Question

I’m very much a noob/hobbyist programmer, putting together a few simple Mac apps.

I’m confused about resource files.

I have some .png images sitting in a folder in my (XCode 4.4) project.
I also have a .plist (containing a dictionary) sitting in my Supporting Files folder.

To access the .plist, I’ve added a few lines of code to dig into the Bundle and get the file I’m after (pretty standard, I believe).

To use the .png files, I simply refer to them by name, and when I run from within Xcode everything does what I’m expecting.

But when I export as an Application, the images are still available and work fine, without me going into the Bundle for them.

So my question is – what determines which resource files I should go into the Bundle for, and which resource files I can assume will just be available by virtue of their being in my Supporting Files folder?

Many Thanks for reading this, and for any help you can give me.

Answer 1

I’m guessing that it depends on the class you are using and when you are only referring to them by name its just a convenience thing and XCode does the work nonetheless.

For example for a UIImage you can type
UIImage *image = [UIImage imageNamed:@"something"];
But XCode will do the NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains or the [NSBoundle mainBoundle] thingy at build time.

You can only do the quick name referencing method on a few frequently-used classes and it’s just for convenience.
This is my theory anyway, it requires confirmation.