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holy shit i just built a legacy 32-bit iOS app from source using a legally clean, fully open-source, multi-platform iOS SDK and it actually managed to run on my jailbroken 32-bit iOS device (a 3rd-gen iPod touch)
this is a huge win for touchHLE development i'm so happy
please don't signal-boost this okay, it's not ready for prime time, though it is all public if you know where to look
this is also, by the way, entirely the result of the hard work of other touchHLE contributors, not us, for once! we merely dared to try the SDK on a real device
this is going to be so much less painful than running obsolete versions of Xcode on an incredibly obsolete version of OS X in an insufferably slow virtual machine stored on spinning rust, all on a passively-cooled laptop that, bless its heart, only has two cores, and it's Intel
damn you can't do dlsym(dlopen(0, 0), "objc_msgSend") in a binary that hasn't linked libobjc, even with the dyld shared cache. i was really hoping that would work it'd be so funny. apple please make the dyld shared cache work like that. ignore the security folks they hate fun
dlsym(dlopen("/usr/lib/libobjc.A.dylib", 0), "objc_msgSend") works though! yay.wav
what the fuck, modern macOS (Monterey, but allegedly also macOS 26) still has the ability to sync IPA files to iOS devices, sneakily hidden? if you open an iOS device in the Finder and drop an IPA file onto the “General” page, it actually installs?! i can't fucking believe this
it has been more than 8 years since iTunes last allowed you to sync apps (in .ipa form) to iOS devices, and in the meantime iTunes has been slaughtered, the organs harvested from its quaking corpse and reanimated as unworthy “Music” and “Devices” apps, so this is astonishing
touchHLE 32-bit iOS toolchain demo video!!! exciting UIKit app!!! me rambling at the camera about dynamic linking!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OJO7WXa5LU
@hikari really cool!
out of curiosity... why a video?
@r why not?
@hikari videos are hard to skim, which we only slightly dislike, but certain people (not us) seem to really *hate* it
otoh video does seem to convey a sense of excitement more effectively than text (especially the "raw" way you've done it), so it's something we're thinking about doing
@hikari weeeeeeee! awesome as all hell! especially the part where you run it with dlopen and all that stuff. Actually, what you're talking about sounds like gobject, didn't know objective C is inspired from gobject so much, or is it the other way round? O well. Btw, I wonder if the emulator can run stuff like voiceover already, or is it not implementing enough features yet?
@esoteric_programmer i believe there's commonalities between Objective-C, GObject and COM. maybe every 1990's C-based GUI framework ends up with a similar object-oriented substrate? we're only really familiar with the first of these though.
re: VoiceOver, touchHLE's primary focus is on games, and those are broadly speaking completely inaccessible because they don't even use the standard UI frameworks, let alone attempt to use accessibility APIs. we could perhaps try to add accessibility API support for the tiny bit of UIKit we do attempt to support, but it's questionable if it would be useful right now, you can't really run non-game apps. i guess it might be nice if the app launcher (fake home screen) would be accessible though.
@hikari and “Podcasts” and “TV” and…
@hikari Right? I genuinely would have expected all this stuff to have gone away but nope, it's still there.
@richardstephens @hikari They specifically fixed iPod syncing when that broke in a 26 beta, so *some*one cares.
@hikari Really?! Wow. This is a great find!