Sim Deploy

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Jerry Jones

The iPhone Simulator is a big part of any iOS developer’s workflow, but running any apps in the simulator that weren’t put there by Xcode can be a major pain. Generally the simulator is considered a developers tool, so what’s wrong with installing apps as part of the build process? At this point, based on the combined experiences of Joel and I, it seems commonplace for one or many non-developers to be part of the development process of an iOS app. Managers, Designers, Animators, Sales – they probably all want to run the latest build on the simulator, without all the difficulties of getting a build environment setup.

To solve this, we’ve put together a little utility – Sim Deploy. It’s nothing fancy, it does what it says on the box: it provides drag and drop installation of simulator builds. It also allows for downloading a build from a remote URL. To provide a simple, and as close to an OTA experience, we added support for a custom URL scheme. This means new builds can be provided by simply asking a person to click a link. I know, I know — Fancy.

If you ever send simulator builds around, give it a shot, and give us some feedback. We’ve already got a couple more little tools in progress that should help this utility being even more useful than we think it already is – but we’re more than happy to help improve workflow cases we haven’t though of as well.

Sim Deploy Webpage

Jerry Jones

About Jerry Jones

Co-Founder of Spaceman Labs, Inc. Formerly of Mellmo, Inc. iOS Developer since 2007. You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and doing backflips on jet skis.
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  • http://danimal.org/ Dan Weeks

    Nice work guys. The only suggestion or request I have is a command line way to package up a simulator build for deploy. We have a build system (think Jenkins or Buildbot) that will take all sorts of builds and make them available internally. Currently we use https://github.com/landonf/simlaunch/ (and we had to dig out the options) to do this. A simple method that we could then pass around the sim deploy’d url once on our server would be great.

    • http://twitter.com/jerryhjones Jerry Jones

      Great suggestion Dan – I had definitely intended on writing a post highlighting how this could be setup to use with a build system. At the moment, Sim Deploy only needs a zip file of the simulator .app bundle. Creating a clickable link is simple, zip the simulator product and copy off to a web accessible location. Publish a link using the url scheme that points to this file – and you should be good to go!

      • http://danimal.org/ Dan Weeks

        Oi! Yes. That makes perfect sense and will make build system integration that much easier.

        Thanks Jerry!

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