Building Blink on OS X

Blink is a SIP client for various platforms. On OS X they only officially distribute the app in the Mac App Store. However the project is GPLed, so you can build it yourself. Here is how:

Download the source

Blink uses the darcs version control system. Download link or brew install darcs using brew package manager.

Open the terminal, and clone the source:

darcs get http://devel.ag-projects.com/repositories/public/blink-cocoa

You can then open the project in Xcode.

Dependencies

The probject comes with a number of GPLed dependencies which I couldn't find an easy way to build, but you don't need to. There is a special version of Blink for SIP2SIP, which contains what we need.

Download that then run these commands to copy them to the right location in the source tree:

mkdir -p Distribution/Resources/
cp -R /Volumes/Blink\ for\ SIP2SIP/SIP2SIP.app/Contents/Resources/lib Distribution/Resources
cp -R /Volumes/Blink\ for\ SIP2SIP/SIP2SIP.app/Contents/Frameworks Distribution/

Change build settings

The Xcode project was made on Snow Leopard and targets those frameworks. So if you don't have those, you'll need to tweak Build Settings:

• Architectures -> Base SDK -> Latest OS X (10.10)

Since some of the libraries we just copied from SIP2SIP are x86-only we will get errors if we try to build & run the 64-bit version. Instead we will simply build in x86:

• Architectures -> Architectures -> 32-bit Intel (i386)

Also disable code signing:

• Code Signing -> Code Signing Identity -> Don't Code Sign
• Code Signing -> Provisioning Profile -> None

After these changes you might have to close and re-open Xcode.

Code changes

Hit run, in case you receive the errors

convertBaseToScreen is deprecated, use -convertRectToScreen instead
convertScreenToBase is deprecated, use -convertRectFromScreen instead

then that means that you must change the input parameter of type CGPoint to CGRect and then take only the CGPoint you need from the result, e.g. try moving the .origin outside of the the brackets. Example:

aRect.origin = [aView.window convertScreenToBase:aRect.origin]; 

becomes

aRect.origin = [aView.window convertRectFromScreen:aRect].origin;

Run

That's it, hit run and after a few seconds the project should launch. Yay to free software!

If you're being bugged about allowing incoming connections and access to your contacts at each launch, simply

sudo codesign --force --sign - /Applications/Blink\ Pro.app/