Beyond Build and Run

Helen McManus, University of Southern Queensland

On a daily basis we all hit cmd-R to compile and run our latest creation. For such a frequently performed action, we rarely give any thought as to what is going on behind the scenes and how we can influence it to our advantage; especially when attempting to debug problems.

The purpose of this talk is to provide an introduction to features present in the preprocessor and Xcode itself that allow us to manipulate how the compiler is called and the options passed to it. This in turn can be used to affect the output provided by our programmes once running.

See how preprocessor macros, Xcode’s schemas and other techniques can be used to provide you with a richer environment in which to work.


Helen has been programming since before she could even spell ‘polymorphism’. She was first introduced to Objective-C while studying through an AUC workshop.

Since those giddy days of university, she has moved to the Netherlands and now works as (but not limited to) an iOS programmer!


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