Build process experiments with PhoneGap

I’ve made some quick updates on the train this morning, and ended up creating a Bourne shell script in the iPhone directory of PhoneGap for renaming a brand-new PhoneGap fork to whatever your project is called. This also works with the previous changes I made to my buildprocess branch, meaning that when you’re done, you shouldn’t have any references to PhoneGap in your code at all. It also makes developing quite a lot easier, since renaming my XCode project file by hand is cumbersome, and needs to be done every time I start a new project.

Here’s the excerpt from its usage information, which is printed when you run the command without any arguments:

Usage: ./iphone/rename-phonegap.sh [-r] [-v] [-g] -n 
  -n  Specify the name of the new project
  -r  Rename all instances of PhoneGap; use with care, as
      this will make it very difficult to merge in future updates
  -v  Enable verbose mode
  -g  Use git to rename files

Quite simply, it uses some shell scripting magic to rename the appropriate files, and update your Info.plist file with the necessary settings that can control behaviour within the Objective-C code. And if you pass it the -g flag, it will make those updates in Git, so you can (hopefully) more easily merge changes down from Github.

With luck, if Apple doesn’t have any problems with PhoneGap and their developers just see the phrase in our source code, assuming it’s some nefarious framewor that the app developers are pulling in, this should be enough to get the apps passing on their own merit.  I really didn’t want to have to do this, and I’d prefer to revert this in the future if I can get through to Apple on my open letter I’d sent, but until that happens, this will have to do.

Also, I thought I’d mention that I haven’t heard back from Apple, despite sending in repeated emails. I recently called their support team, but was told by a woman with a beautiful Irish accent that she couldn’t do anything for me.  As far as she knew, the iTunes Connect department doesn’t have any sort of phone number to reach them, and the iTunes Connect database isn’t viewable by any other departments.  I’m sending another email out today, but for every passing day I get less and less optimistic.