Importing Cocoa Frameworks

FXGen also lets you import third party (or your own) Cocoa frameworks that were written in Objective-C and compiled with Xcode, so that you can reference them from your Elements projects.

FXGen for Cocoa .frameworks is integrated into the Fire IDE and available via the "Tools|Cocoa|FXGen|Import Third-party .framework" menu. Selecting the command will show the following sheet:

Select the .framework you want to import at the top, either by typing its path, dragging the file into the text field from Finder, or using the "Browse" button. Select the base SDK and platform from the dropdown box below it.

If the .framework has additional link dependencies, you can specify these as comma-separate list under Link Libraries. For example, if the framework requires libxml, or libc++, you could specify "xml,c++". This lets the build chain know to automatically pass these names to the linker when building an app that references this framework's .fx file.

Finally, you can specify the destination folder where FXGen should put the finished .fx files, at the bottom.

Click "Import" to start the import process, and FXGen will launch the import script in Terminal, where you can see its progress.

Depending on the size and complexity of the framework's headers, this can take a minute or two.