Plausible Blocks 1.1 Beta

February 8, 2010, by Landon Fuller

Plausible Blocks (PLBlocks) provides a drop-in runtime and toolchain for using blocks in iPhone 2.2+ and Mac OS X 10.5 applications. We’ve started using PLBlocks in shipping iPhone applications, and soon-to-ship Mac OS X applications, and have been working to add support for some key features — the new PLBlocks 1.1-beta2 is the first release to include:

• Objective-C Garbage Collection Support
• C/C++ support

We’ve been using the new beta release for our own day-to-day development for a few weeks now, and hope you’ll help us test out some of the new features. The updated SDK is available for Leopard and Snow Leopard from the PLBlocks project page.

If you’d like to read more about using blocks in your own software, we recommend:

• Joachim Bengtsson’s comprehensive Programming with C Blocks
• Mike Ash’s Series on Blocks and PLBlocks (Part 1and Part 2)
• My Own “Using Blocks” Series (Parts 1 and Part 2)

iPad Support

We’ve verified that both PLBlocks 1.0 and 1.1-beta2 work with the iPad SDK, and plan on integrating Apple’s beta iPhoneOS compiler updates in a future preview release of PLBlocks for iPad developers.

The new iPad compiler also appears to support the use of blocks on iPhone OS 3.2+; we’ll be very excited to see official block support for the platform. The iPhone OS 3.2 SDK GCC sources can be found at http://opensource.apple.com/tarballs/seeds/.