Showing posts with label xcode. Show all posts
Showing posts with label xcode. Show all posts

Sunday, November 20, 2011

UITapGestureRecognizer and “unrecognized selector sent to instance” errors.

This is just a very quick note for search engine posterity, in case anybody has the same frustrating problem I had today.

I am implementing some gestures for an iOS art app (as in a work of media art, the "medium" of which is an iPhone/iPad application). I was following the "Event Handling Guide for iOS" from Apple.

After much Googling and some very informative stops at StackOverflow, I had got basically nowhere. Everything seemed right, my code conformed tightly to the tutorial and to everyone else’s, and everybody else who found a solution had obviously solved a very different core problem than I was facing. What could be wrong?!

It turns out the problem was as simple as:

-(void) handleTap
{
    NSLog(@"*** GOT A TAP ***");
}
    

Now, in real life you would almost never use a method as dumb and simple as that, but when setting up your classes for initial hacking and debugging you just might. According to the tutorial, it should work:

The action methods for handling gestures—and the selector for identifying them—are expected to conform to one of two signatures:
- (void)handleGesture
- (void)handleGesture:(UIGestureRecognizer *)sender

Silly programmer, tricks are for kids! The standard-issue selector looks for only the second signature, and if it doesn’t find it you get the error whenever you tap: unrecognized selector sent to instance! boo!

The solution, then, is to declare and implement the method with the argument. That works fine.

-(void) handleTap: (UIGestureRecognizer *)sender
{
    NSLog(@"*** GOT A TAP ***");
}
    

To be fair, Apple has an enormous amount of documentation available online, and it’s not so shocking that a tutorial is out of date. For us iOS newbies it’s frustrating, but I don’t think anybody else is doing a better job of this at the moment.