Justin added a Twitter posting feature to Golden Cheetah a couple weeks ago. However, it used basic authentication, which Twitter has announced is going away in favor of OAuth only. So, after several more days of coding he did a bang up job of rolling in support using liboauth.

Now, getting liboauth and it’s prerequisites configured to play nicely with my Golden Cheetah dev environment has been another struggle. I have been making the OS X releases of Golden Cheetah for a while – and we package them as a universal binary (i386/ppc) with 10.4 support. I’ve had to custom compile Qt, QWT, srmio and all that stuff to enable this.

In brief, liboauth needed to be compiled against the same arch that GC and co. have been, and it really wanted to go native, eg x86_64 on my MacBook Pro. After a night and day of tinkering…here’s what worked. Thanks to Justin for getting this going.

Export config flags (just makes life easier on the command line):

export CFLAGS=-mmacosx-version-min=10.4
export CPPFLAGS=-mmacosx-version-min=10.4

openssl 1.0.0a:

./config -m32

liboauth 0.8.8 / curl 7.21.1:

./configure CC="gcc -arch i386" CXX="g++ -arch i386" -host i386

Golden Cheetah:

After getting linker errors for a while, I realized that I had to directly link to the static version of libcrypto that was installed alongside libssl in /usr/local/ssl.

Undefined symbols:
  "_EVP_MD_size", referenced from:
      _oauth_body_hash_file in liboauth.a(liboauth_la-hash.o)
      _oauth_body_hash_data in liboauth.a(liboauth_la-hash.o)
ld: symbol(s) not found

Here’s the relevant bit of src.pro:

!isEmpty( LIBOAUTH_INSTALL ) {
INCLUDEPATH += $${LIBOAUTH_INSTALL}/include
LIBS += /usr/local/ssl/lib/libcrypto.a
LIBS +=  $${LIBOAUTH_INSTALL}/lib/liboauth.a
LIBS += -lz
LIBS += -lcurl
DEFINES += GC_HAVE_LIBOAUTH
SOURCES += TwitterDialog.cpp
HEADERS += TwitterDialog.h
}

Golden Cheetah is about to release a new version. There have been extensive updates…some great, unique new features for analyzing cycling power training data. The full feature list will be announced with the official release. In brief:

• direct SRM download
• colorized power zones in plots
• altitude (from supported files)
• WKO file support (including bulk import)
• Critical Power (CP60) computation from aggregate CP data.
• weekly plot of time/distance and BikeScore/Intensity
• calendar view of workouts

There has also been significant work done under the hood in preparation for a pretty big announcement coming in the next few weeks. Exciting times.

Mac release candidate is available here. Linux and windows versions will be announced on the Golden Cheetah mailing list.

—

For posterity, I’ve upgraded my dev system to OS 10.6, Snow Leopard, and had to rebuild Qt and QWT. Since we want Golden Cheetah to continue to support PPC/Intel and 10.4+, here is the configure command I needed to use for building Qt 4.5.2.

./configure -static -prefix /usr/local/Qt4.5.2 -make libs -opensource -qt-sql-sqlite -LD="gcc -mmacosx-version-min=10.4" -confirm-license -universal -sdk /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk

We finally got a new version of Golden Cheetah out the door….it’s been only like, almost a year. Whew! Pressure is off.

I had been making personal builds since the summer to give out to folks who wanted to take advantage off several new features introduced since the march build. Sean gave Justin and I write access to the svn code this past December and we’ve been playing catch up on a backlog of patches, and i’ve been remembering c++ and Qt.

Several new features have been added in this release: Critical Power calculator, find best intervals utility, Pedal Force / Pedal Velocity chart, iBike and Ergomo CSV import, GUI power zones creator, separate vertical axes for Power / HR / Cadence and Speed in the Ride plot, sorting rides with the most recent at the top of the list, and many bug fixes courtesy of JT Conklin. This version is also using FTDI D2xx drivers rather than VCP.

We’ve also switched to a numbered versioning system which will serve to better indicate which svn revision the releases were built from and perhaps will mask our slow release cycle. :)

The new release is available on the Golden Cheetah download page.

super annoying…Qt advertises that you can make an xcode project file using qmake to enable native development on mac…i had never been able to get the golden cheetah project working in this way, even after following what little documentation i could find. each time i’d run “qmake -spec macx-xcode” would result in a non-parseable xcodeproj file. to date i’ve just been coding and compiling with a simple text editor.

justin had done some initial troubleshooting, eventually filing a bug report with trolltech. he determined that the QMAKE_CXXFLAGS = -DGC_BUILD_DATE=”`date +’\”%a_%b_%d,_%Y\”‘`” was causing the issue. commenting out the offending line to get a valid xcode project and having to create another define in a source file.

a dev from trolltech got back to justin confirming the bug and offering a workaround by manually adding the directive in the xcode target’s build settings. they also mentioned that a fix would be coming in a future version of qmake, but gave nothing specific. i spent most of the afternoon trying to follow this workaround to no avail. it was very frustrating. i looked at the project file that qmake created and something looked odd with how special characters in the qmake_cxxflags key were escaped with slashes. too many it seemed.

finally, i came across a forum post where someone was trying to set a define macro to have a string value – jsut what we are trying to do. the solution is somewhat a hack, a bandaid for a shortcoming of qmake… triple-escape the outside quotation marks. looks like: -DGC_BUILD_DATE=\\\”`date +’\”%a_%b_%d,_%Y\”‘`\\\”

it compiles fine on the linux (ubuntu) test box, manually on mac os x (using qmake/make) and also creates a valid (parseable) xcode project file, but it won’t compile in xcode. i still have to disable these lines in src.pro and add them in by manually later. for the time being, i’m planning to develop in xcode, and build test versions without the build date/version number and then compile beta/release versions by hand, which works fine.

for reference, here are the lines i’m referring to in src.pro:

QMAKE_CXXFLAGS += -DGC_BUILD_DATE=\\\"`date +'\"%a_%b_%d,_%Y\"'`\\\"
QMAKE_CXXFLAGS += -DGC_SVN_VERSION=\\\"`svnversion . | cut -f '2' -d ':'`\\\"
QMAKE_CXXFLAGS += -DGC_MAJOR_VER=1
QMAKE_CXXFLAGS += -DGC_MINOR_VER=0

the top two lines are string values; the bottom two values are integers. also note, this has been reported to not work in win32, but i haven’t tested it myself. after we get the mac/linux builds going i’ll get back to the win build.

oops. school’s out and i’ve completely ignored documentation. looking to correct that, please accept the following communiqué:

the winter show went very well – it seemed that cloud reader was well received. most of the favorable comments were split among two categories…those which really liked the performative aspect of the project and could envision it large on a wall….and those who reacted strongly to the intimate aspect of seeing it running on the iPhone screen.

since the project was originally designed for the small screen in ITP’s 2×2 class, the comments were enough to encourage me to finally get around to iPhone application development. i’ve looked over various objective-c, cocoa and iphone docs over the past year, but never really made a commitment to actually learn or apply it. now i’m driven, and have come to love square braces :)

separately and coincidentally, sean from golden cheetah decided to extend justin and i write access to the svn codebase and the website. he’s been quite busy and gc development has stalled for it. although i’ve been busy with school, between the three of us we should be able keep abreast of patches and implement new features.

i’m trying to be cautious with the project…i don’t want to do something that will expose me as a (programming) fraud! justin and i were able to get it working happily in xcode…although the QMAKE_CXXFLAGS += -DGC_BUILD_DATE=”`date +’\”%a_%b_%d,_%Y\”‘`” compiler directive in src.pro was causing qmake to create non-parseable xcodeproj files…i think it may have to do with escaping special characters. justin sent a bug report to Qt…hopefully we’ll hear something at some point…for the time-being i’ve commented out the line in the .pro file and added a conditional define in MainWindow.cpp.

so, tinkering with the golden cheetah code has be getting me comfortable with code that isn’t java and i think i’ll be well on my way to get to with with cloud reader for iphone…come on apple and approve my developer application!