Data Abstract and RemObjects SDK for Cocoa on iOS 7 and the 64-bit A7

Hi. I wanted to give you a quick update on the status of Data Abstract and RemObjects SDK with regards to both the new iOS 7.0 and – more interestingly – the new 64-bit iOS on the iPhone 5S.

![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7f/Apple_A7_chip.jpg/543px-Apple_A7_chip.jpg)Over the past couple of weeks, we have been debating whether we should make a small interim update to RO/DA for Cocoa available to “officially” support the two new platforms/technologies, and we have decided against such an update, for the following reasons:

We’ve (of course) been testing the RemObjects SDK and Data Abstract code base with iOS 7.0 since the first beta, and with 64-bit since the iOS 7 GM and the iPhone 5S is out. The current code base as shipped in the Fall release about a month ago is working perfectly with iOS 7, and no changes are needed.

It is also working fine on 64-bit (ignoring some minor warnings), as expected – after all, the same code base has been running on 64-bit Mac OS X since forever. Still, it would be nice to ship an update release that contains a universal binary pre-compiled for arm64 out of the box, but there’s one downside to that:

Right now, if we switched RO/DA to build for arm64 by default, that would mean we’d also need to set the minimum deployment target to iOS 7 – which in turn means the binary we’d ship would not allow you to build applications that still target iOS 6 (or lower), something we know many of you still do.

On the flip side, for those of you who would like to build your RO/DA based apps for 64-bit, it is a simple job to rebuild RO/DA yourself: Simply open the project in Xcode, change the architecture to ARCHS_STANDARD_INCLUDING_64_BIT (and clear the deployment target, of course), and hit rebuild. (We’re also making a pre-release build available today that does have 64-bit enabled (at the cost of losing deployment target options, as indicated.)

Apple is promising to sort out the deployment target situation “next month” to allow arm64 to co-exist with older deployment targets, and we figured it would be best to hold out for that — especially given how easy it is for you to manually rebuild for 64-bit now, if you need it.

I will keep you posted as this develops – and once again, us holding back on shipping the update does not mean that the current code base you have now is not perfectly fine for arm64 use already.

Let us know what you think.