rooSwitch + Xcode

I’ve been using Brian Cooke’s nice little rooSwitch for a few months now, but perhaps in an uncommon way.

rooSwitch allows you to switch applications settings. It’s like a profile manager for any well-written Mac app.

I use rooSwitch primarily with Xcode. As a contractor, I have dozens of clients. With some of these clients, I’m the — ahem — lone wolf. With others, I’m working with an existing team.

Lots of different projects means lots of different settings.

Some are spaces-to-indent guys. Others are tabs. Some build in /Users/Shared. Others in /tmp. All have their own __MyCompanyName__ replacement, which by the way you set like this:

defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions "{ \"ORGANIZATIONNAME\" = \"FooBar, Inc\"; \"FULLUSERNAME\" = \"Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch\"; }"

Before rooSwitch, I had a .command file per client that would invoke defaults write com.apple.Xcode .... It was a mess: it was tricky to set up, hard to maintain, and I’d often forget to invoke the command before switching projects.

Now everything is kept in one .rooSwitch file, which is easy to set up and use. Ahh, setting sanity realized.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006
01:16 PM