Use Latest iOS

December 21, 2010 John Blanco iPhone

One of the quiet new features in the newest XCode release is a new BaseSDK option “Use Latest iOS”. Not all iOS developers will appreciate this unless they’ve been developing for at least 6 months or so.

The problem Apple has solved was an infuriating one. Since an XCode project (a target specifically) can only have one Base SDK, and since the newest SDK changes every couple months or so, we’re constantly loading up old projects (or sample code) and being met with the dreaded “Base SDK Not Found” message. ARGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!

So, for example, say you want to run an old project to see how you implemented your camera code or something like that. You load the project, but it was running on iOS 4.0. The new XCode only has 4.1. So, no Base SDK found! You have to double-click the target (or targets), and change the Base SDK to the newest one. In fact, 99% of the time, you *always* want the newest one.

Now, as of the newest XCode, you can set the Base SDK to “Use Latest iOS” and, in theory, you’ll never have to change it again unless you have a perverse need to keep your app held back to an older SDK — in which case you are hanging on to an older XCode, too.

I say — thank you, Apple! One day, you’ll figure out how to include old SDK’s in the newest XCode builds, but in the meantime this does save me some grief! :-)

John Blanco

John Blanco is a freelance iOS developer living in Lakewood, Colorado. He's been developing mobile apps for over 15 years, beginning in the medieval days of Java ME and Blackberry and all the way through iPhone and Android! He's led development on dozens of apps across a wide variety of domains such as retail, vision, orthotics, games, sports, and more!

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