So about 3 months ago I wrote a post about how our development tools often waste a lot of our often delaying productivity. Twenty years ago this would have been unacceptable. But these days with “free” tools and budget cuts for them we can often spend more time with our tools getting them to work than we should.

When I left off I was waiting for Xcode 12.1 to install. Well it installed and I tested the matter at hand and didn’t quite see the problem the user was reporting. So closed up things and here I am today trying to do a release version of the app with some additional fixes that Android and Windows also got. So then Xamarin tells me that Visual Studio 2019 won’t work with Xcode 11.5. Hmm, I swear I installed 12.1. Apparently not but it was running so Xamarin used it three months ago.

So this afternoon I finding out how to remove 11.5 and make 12.1 the default Xcode. Guess I’m also going to need a Mac cheat sheet because I’m not on it every day and often not every month either. Anyway I got Xcode 11.5 removed by dragging it’s icon out of the Applications folder into the trash bin. Then you have to empty the trash (the article seemed to neglect that). Next I needed to drag the Xcode 12.1 into Applications. Well for some reason it is hard to drag it there and it installed to the desktop. Thing is this takes forever and now I’m waiting for it to finish the “drag” to the Applications folder. What a funky way of doing things!

Maybe there is a way to cancel such “drags” but I haven’t found it yet. Now I’m not sure if the fact that I was too cheap to buy an external SSD for more memory and bought a 500GB HDD instead but it was all of $36. SSD was a lot more and users complained it ran hot (the HDD doesn’t). And then once everything is copacetic the slowness doesn’t effect builds much.

I put the iOS builds last because they get scrutinized more by Apple than Android or Windows. Google does little of that with an Android submission to Google Play and Microsoft maybe a little more though some of that testing is done on the developer’s machine. At least if I put the iOS submissions last I can include anything overlooked errors that the Android and Windows users find.

So this afternoon I sat down to update an iOS app using Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 and and Xamarin. Connecting too my MacBook Air I was informed that I needed too update the Xamarin iOS library and Xamarin could do it if I wanted. So I let it. And then it sits there after having downloaded the library install file to the Mac and says something went wrong and it couldn’t be installed. Great.

I look up the problem. Seems that there might have been a problem with the download. Looking on the Internet this seems to be a common problem and some solved it by using a link and going their PC and downloading the library, putting it on a USB drive and sneaker netting it to the Mac. But another suggestion was to update Visual Studio on the Mac which I have installed because I found just having Xamarin for remote builds didn’t work as advertised.

So I updated Visual Studio 2019 to the latest version. Fine and a new iOS library for Xamarin was also installed. Except that VS on my Windows machine complained it couldn’t use that update. Huh? The VS on my PC is the latest version too. Anyone at Microsoft ever heard of synchronizing releases? This is the problem when you get rid of supervisors whose job is to see those things happen.

See the library update installed on the Mac was TOO NEW! The PC VS wanted a previous version. So I downloaded that version to my Linux box which was quick. Then I wondered why use a USB stick. I should just be able to move it across my local network. Yup, that opened another can of worms including file sharing setting on the Mac, yada yada yada.

To shorten the story I did wind up just putting it on a USB stick, plugging it into the Mac, copying to the desk top and clicking on it. Seems the install went okay (which it did).

So back to VS on Windows. Again Xamarin runs and now complains that Xcode needs to be updated to version 12.1. Great. Of course as many Apple developers will tell you the process of downloading a developer app doesn’t work too well on the App Store. You get to watch it stall out after a while. Yeah, the solution is to get the link at the developer section and download from there. Which worked though Apple’s servers are still a lot slower than Microsoft’s.

So right now hours later the update of Xcode is installing. All this to build the iOS app with two line changes so that it only runs in Light mode. Seems newer iPhone users want to run dark mode and were getting nothing but a dark screen in my app. I don’t seem to recall Apple who is pretty good about telling us what things to update saying we needed to do this. Also changing an app to run in dark mode is no trivial thing especially since my app does some custom charts and graphics. So to at least one customer I informed them to change back to light mode at least when running the app. But for two lines of code that won’t be a problem for any other customers.

Now, tomorrow to see what other surprises and gotchas will stall what should be a quick and easy update. Sometimes we spend more time dealing with our tools than writing our apps.