Well, That Was Easy!

I just took a stab a creating my first Universal Binary, and after a false start, I got it up and running with very little effort at all.

It's not quite as easy as Mr. Jobs made it look during Monday's keynote.... You have to do more than just hit a check box in your project. Not much more, mind you, but a bit more.

To be sure you get things set up right, be sure to read the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines document that Apple is providing.

I did this for a product that we are planning to release next Monday (6/13/2005), but since I can't actually test the Intel side of things yet, I think I'm going to just release the PowerPC version as planned, and make the Universal Binary available as a separate download.

I Want to Know... Don't You?

Which brings me to another point... At this point in time, the Finder gives you no easy way to tell a Universal Binary from any other kind of binary. So, what I've done is adopted a version naming convention that lets me look at the Get Info window for any given binary I've created and immediately tell what type it is. Basically it's this simple:

• v1.0;p - The ";p" signifies a PowerPC-specific binary
  
• v1.0;i - The ";i" signifies an Intel-specific binary
  
• v1.0;u - The ";u" signifies a Universal Binary that will run on both Intel and PowerPC.
  

Like I said, simple. In fact, it took me about as much time to write this post as it did to create the Universal Binary, test it and come up with this version numbering/target processor convention.

So, Mr. 8-Ball, will this transition be pretty simple?

Signs Pont To Yes.

Diz