The irony and the insanity

Posted by Nick Loadholtes on 7/12/2005 filed in Apple, OS X, Programming

Mac people have always been proud of their “no command line” interface. Everything is point-and-click and everyone is happy. Starting with OS X, they have been including a command line interface, which is one of the reasons I came over to the Mac camp (I grew up on the command line, and that’s where I’ll stay!).
Yesterday I was playing with XCode and I noticed that in my files it was putting __MyCompanyName__ in the comments. In most IDE’s this is a pretty easy to change setting to allow you to put your company’s name in there. But when I started searching the prefrences panes on XCode I could not find anything that had that string in it.
Flustered, I turned to Google to see what it said. And of course, there was the answer. So what does the offical documentation from Apple about the IDE they built and use to develop OS X and all of their software say?
It says to open up a terminal and type in a bunch of crap on the command line.

*sigh* One step forward, one step back. In case anyone is wondering, the crap to type in is:

defaults write com.apple.ProjectBuilder PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions ‘ORGANIZATIONNAME = “your companyname” ;’

Call me crazy, but it just seems to me that these types of settings would have a nice little GUI inside of XCode where they are set. Or even a seperate app (ala the RegEdit util in windows) to set this kind of stuff. Hmmm, on second thought, perhaps this is an opportunity for a new application to be written…
Tags: OSX, XCode