iOS 8 & OS X Yosemite Beta Discussion

Solar2D iOS
#1

Hi Everybody,

Given today’s announcement that Developer Previews for both OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 are ready to install, I thought I’d take an informal poll of who’s taking the plunge this early in the beta period. Every year it seems like a bit of a gamble…do we choose to play with all the new goodies and test our apps out in the latest OS, or do we play it safe and keep using stable software to develop with? Especially if you are getting ready to release an iOS app in the next couple of months, it’s not necessarily an easy decision.

Personally, I’m fortunate to have two fairly recent Macs in my collection, so I’ll keep one of them on Mavericks & Xcode 5 (mainly so I can build for distribution), but the second one will be my Yosemite & Xcode 6 Guinea Pig. And I’m going to upgrade my iPhone and iPad to the iOS 8 beta, and borrow my wife’s devices if I need to test something in iOS 7. How about you guys? How do you deal with the extended beta test period every year? If you’ve never done it before, keep in mind that Corona Labs tends not to support OS upgrades until they have gone GM or public, and Apple makes it extremely difficult (if not downright impossible) to downgrade iOS, so proceed with caution!

Also: what features are you most fired up about? I personally am looking forward to TestFlight integration and the ability to bundle apps on the App Store. Looking forward to hearing from you all!

-Jason

#2

I want to play around with the beta of Xcode 6 which only requires Mavericks, but I’m not sure if putting that on my system will mess up being able to do Corona Builds for the App Store.

Anybody wanna be the guinea pig? :slight_smile:

 Jay

#3

Don’t think my iPhone 4 will support much if any of the new features so I’ll probably stick with IOS 7 for now. Might give it a go on the iPad mini though… Very interested in HealthKit for some apps I had in mind. I hope Corona Labs can start ramping up support for these new, exciting and potentially lucrative capabilities asap. 

#4

I’ll let you know in the morning as I’m going to take the plunge with XCode 6 and the latest Corona SDK build - using 10.9.3 though.  :o

#5

From my experience with iOS betas, the OS really isn’t stable enough to use until at least beta 3 or beta 4.  I filed more bug reports after loading iOS 7 beta 1 on the first day than I have in my entire career of working with Apple.  If you’re into making the product better and have time to deal with some rough software trudge ahead.

You will not be able to build for an iOS 8 device without Xcode 6.0, so trying to test your Corona apps on a device running beta will be problematic.  The usual advice is don’t install beta software on devices you depend on, i.e. your primary telephone (that needs to keep working), your main development machine, etc.  If you have the luxury of having extra test hardware, then getting in the beta process can be fun and help get a start on testing things.

As far as Corona Labs and Corona SDK goes, there is a reason we wait until later in the Beta process.  If we enabled iOS 8 tomorrow, you would report problems that may be in the OS that will be corrected by Apple.  We simply can’t spend the engineering time patching beta bugs that Apple will eventually fix.  You would much prefer for us to be fixing our own bugs and wait until the Beta is reasonably stable (beta 4, 5, and 6 typically) before we enable the beta’s in the build process and we won’t formally move to the release build for a few weeks after it goes live so we can test things thoroughly against the new production target. 

Now as far as supporting some of the new SDK/API’s that are coming out, obviously they will be available to Enterprise subscribers where possible.  As far as other things that roll in, it’s too early for us to have this discussion.  We learned about it today just like you did.  There was a lot.  Some of it make make it into the core, others may become plugins, others may be for Enterprise only. 

Now personally what I was I most excited about?  From Yosemite, I really thought they did a nice job with the UI.  There wasn’t anything iOS 8 specific that stood out to me.  I was very pleased to see all of the interoperability between the devices.  Having AirDrop work between the Mac and the iDevices will be very handy.  The ability to take a call on my Mac will equally be good.   From the SDK point of view, I think the ability to load dialogs from other apps and have those apps do work (sheets) will be very cool. 

And Swift as a language looks like it will be easier to pick up than Objective C.  Hopefully Enterprise users will have the ability to use Swift, which could make it easier for Corona SDK developers to get into more of the native side. 

#6

Hopefully Enterprise users will have the ability to use Swift, which could make it easier for Corona SDK developers to get into more of the native side.

Amen!  This could be significant.  I’m also interested in seeing how this impacts Corona Cards!

#7

I only have 1 Mac, so I’ll be skipping the OSX beta for now. I might try iOS 8 on 1 device.

Watching the presentation, I kept thinking they have solutions for problems I didn’t know I had. For example, I’ve never started an email on 1 device and then thought I wish I could finish this on another device.

The Swift programming looks interesting, but I need a cross platform solution. So, I don’t see any use for it yet.

#8

I’m only wanting to install Xcode 6 to “play” with (research), not build against it. I just don’t want it to break things when I do a real Corona build against Xcode 5.

 Jay

#9

The last time there was Xcode 4.6 and a Xcode 5.0 Preview so it was a separate app that didn’t write over your live Xcode.  However, I’ve not tried it this time to see. 

Rob

#10

The Corona simulator refuses to run for me in Yosemite :frowning:

#11

We probably haven’t even tried to make it run in Yosemite yet…

#12

I know, since Yosemite was just released a few hours ago. Mavericks though had good backward compatibility with apps.

Please also update the public release :slight_smile:

#13

Here are my findings:

I have an iPod Touch 5th generation for testing. I upgraded it to iOS 8 with no issues.

Nothing really new interface-wise. It feels very much like iOS 7. One nifty thing with the iOS 8 beta is that there’s a Bug Reporter app that allows you to report bugs from your device straight to Apple.

Old Corona apps compiled with Xcode 5.1.1 run fine on iOS 8. I’ve seen no issues (audio or otherwise) so far.

I installed Xcode 6 on my Mavericks setup. It seems to play nice with Xcode 5.1.1. (not fully tested yet though)

The Organizer doesn’t have your devices listed in it anymore. They’ve been put in its own “Devices” section also found under the Xcode “Window” menu.

Compiling a Corona Enterprise project with Xcode 6 built without modifications. However the resulting app will not run on iOS7 devices even if target is set to iOS 6. The app runs fine on iOS 8 though.

If you only have 1 Mac you can install Yosemite on a separate disk partition. That’s what I did. I didn’t have an extra partition to begin with, so I used Disk Utility to re-partition my drive to free up 100GB at the end of the disk (without losing any data).

!!!WARNING!!! As always when doing anything that re-partitions your disk, make sure you have a full backup in case something goes wrong!

After installing Yosemite I can say that it looks really nice. However it feels a bit sluggish. Just a bit though. I’ll put that down to the early beta stage as it’s probably not optimized.

I haven’t tried doing any real work on it yet, and I haven’t tested many new features either. I did try Airdrop, but it didn’t see my iOS 8 device…

#14

Good to know! Luckily I have two machines so one is Yosemite and the other is still Mountain Lion. One mistake I did was to update my main laptop, so I’m stuck compiling on my old one and switching back and forth files via DropBox  :blink:

I agree, Yosemite is indeed a bit slow at times. Not too comfortable with the look of the new dock too.

One thing I wanted to try was Family Sharing, although I won’t be updating to iOS 8 anytime soon so maybe next time.

#15

Thank you.  That was going to be exactly what I wanted to test.  I was kind of hopeful that targeting iOS 7 directly would allow us to compile using Xcode 6.  I’m going to try using Corona Pro and see if there’s any difference in the results (probably not.)

#16

I can confirm that Corona Simulator does not work with OS X Yosemite. This is very frustrating. I know that corona will have to update their simulator sometime, but right now I can’t really do anything. Does anyone know how to revert back to Mavericks? 

Can You Give Us A Timeline for Yosemite Support?

#17

Since Corona Pro compiles server-side it’ll compile with Xcode 5.1.1 from their servers regardless of which Xcode we have installed locally.

I’m quite sure that not being able to run Xcode 6 compiled apps on older iOS versions will be fixed in a later beta once they get around to supporting them. I’ve reported it to them anyway…

#18

@chasemorell
Oh my. You made a backup before you overwrote your installation, right?
If you use TimeMachine you should be able to restore from there.

BTW. It’s unlikely for CoronaLabs to provide a timeline for support since it’s still a *very* early beta. We don’t even know when Apple will release it yet.

#19

@Chase: the only way I know of downgrading your OS is to essentially wipe the drive and do a fresh install of Mavericks, then restore from a Time Machine backup. It’s time consuming and tedious, but at least on OS X we have the option. Downgrading iOS isn’t even possible…

EDIT: based on ignemar’s post, it could be that a Time Machine restore will also restore the OS, saving you the trouble of wiping and re-installing Mavericks, but I can’t say for sure. Regardless, you’re gonna need a Time Machine backup.

#20

Regarding the Simulator not working in Yosemite, I thought I’d add this bit of info for Corona Labs: you can open up the application, and even perform device builds (tested and confirmed), but the parts that I’d imagine are dependent on Java don’t seem to be working. Namely, the welcome window opens up (sometimes) but is blank - and the simulator window opens up, with the device “frame” visible, but just a gray screen. I’m guessing that these are Java-dependent, because on first launch I was prompted to download and install the Java 6 runtime, which doesn’t come pre-installed with the OS (similar to other recent OS X updates).

So actually testing apps in the Corona Simulator, for now, doesn’t work. But you can at least create device builds. However, I have noticed that the application is way more crash-prone in the current Yosemite developer preview. Oftentimes after finishing the device build, the app will crash - and sometimes before I can even make a build.

Ah, the joys of early adoption! :slight_smile: