Month: July 2011

If you work with two monitors of different sizes, Xcode has an annoying bug of launching the iOS Simulator partially off screen — forcing you to manually drag it into position using the mouse. It’s not that bad the first time, but after a full eight hour working day with hundreds of launches, it gets very tedious.

Luckily, we can solve this with Xcode 4’s new “Behavior” settings and a little AppleScript.

Open up your favorite text editor and create the following script:

#!/bin/sh
osascript -e 'tell app "System Events" to set position of window 1 of process "iOS Simulator" to {-864, 134}'

Where where {-864, 134} are the {X, Y} coordinates you’d like the simulator positioned at.

Save the script somewhere appropriate and select it as a new “Run” command in Xcode’s “Run Starts” behavior.

Last week I released a minor update to VirtualHostX. Shortly thereafter, my inbox was flooded with reports of an “unsupported architecture” error on launch. After a quick lipo test I verified that somehow I had managed to build and ship the app as Intel only — no PowerPC support.

I went through my git revision history and was able to track down the error. From what I can tell, the Xcode 3.2.6 update removes the default universal binary option. That’s fine for new projects, but I was completely taken by surprise to see it modify the build settings of an existing project.

Regardless, now that the (once famous) universal binary checkbox is gone, here’s how to add PowerPC support back.

In your target’s build settings, change “Architectures” to “Other” and specify “ppc i386 x86_64”.

Note: It’s entirely possible this whole episode was my fuck-up and not Xcode, but there are a bunch of similar reports online. So who knows? It certainly wasn’t mentioned in the release notes.