When we designed the icon for the new Kitchen Sink demo we tried to use material design principals. We thought it
would look reasonable on iOS but it looked awful. So we decided to adapt the design and create a separate
yet similar icon for iOS.
This is actually quite common but many developers aren’t aware of how easy it is to do these sort of things. The
build process for Codename One is mostly transparent and you can replace/customize pieces of it. In this
case we edited the build.xml file and modified this build target:
<target name="build-for-ios-device" depends="clean,copy-ios-override,copy-libs,jar,clean-override">
<codeNameOne
jarFile="${dist.jar}"
displayName="${codename1.displayName}"
packageName = "${codename1.packageName}"
mainClassName = "${codename1.mainName}"
version="${codename1.version}"
icon="${codename1.icon}"
vendor="${codename1.vendor}"
subtitle="${codename1.secondaryTitle}"
targetType="iphone"
certificate="${codename1.ios.debug.certificate}"
certPassword="${codename1.ios.debug.certificatePassword}"
provisioningProfile="${codename1.ios.debug.provision}"
appid="${codename1.ios.appid}"
automated="${automated}"
/>
</target>We changed one line:
icon="iosicon.png"
We also had to do the same change in the release target:
<target name="build-for-ios-device-release" depends="clean,copy-ios-override,copy-libs,jar,clean-override">This is really convenient as it allows you to override and automate many stages of the build. Every device build
has a target and you can modify things such as which files get packaged.
XML Updates
The pitfall with this technique is that XML files are updated occasionally. The Codename One Settings application
or the IDE preferences will detect out of date build.xml files and offer to update them, this might be required to
take advantage of newer features such as offline build…
This update will eliminate your changes so you will need to reintegrate them. If you have many changes just move them
to an external file that you can include in the right spot so re-integrating changes is easy. Also make sure to keep
the build.xml in version control so an accidental overwrite won’t destroy your work.
2 Comments
Re Kitchen Sink – I’ve been looking at the source to see how some of the stuff in the demo is done, and it would be really good if there were more comments or description in the code (or accompanying the demo) so developers could copy some of the techniques used. There’s a bunch of stuff obviously possible with CN1, but much of it is hidden away and not always obvious that what’s possible.
Here is a neat trick you can do:
Press the edit icon on the top right and just insert your comments or even “can you explain this?” comments. Once done just click the pull request button.
I will merge the pull request and then fix the “explain this” comments… You don’t even need to check out the project.