Setting Up Your Mac to Develop iPhone Applications

The bare minimum needed to develop native iPhone applications is a Mac with OS X Leopard, and the iPhone SDK. That's it. I will be developing iPhone apps on a Mac Mini.

• 1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 1GB memory
• OS X Leopard

PC / Mac "Hybrid"? Oh yes!

I still prefer a PC for day-to-day (we'll see how long that lasts) stuff, but I did want to have the Mac very accessible at my workspace without the clutter of two mice and two keyboards on the same desk, so I setup Synergy. At this point I have a Mac on my left monitor and a PC on my right monitor.

Synergy is a great Open Source software that will allow you to share a single mouse and keyboard (and clip board) between your Mac and PC (or *nix box, if you prefer). You will need to have a dual monitor (or more) setup for this solution to make sense. It's fairly easy to setup, and pretty effortless once you're up and running.

Here are a few Synergy tips based on my experience with it so far:

1. Use your system IP addresses in place of host names during setup, I had trouble with host names.
2. Make sure Synergy is in startup on both machines, it's a hassle otherwise.
3. If you need to restart the machine (PC in my case) that acts as the Synergy server you have to shut both systems down, boot the server, and then boot the client (Mac in my case).
4. If you're sharing a PC keyboard (I haven't tried sharing the Mac keyboard) the ALT Key is equal to the Command Key on a Mac. It's been a week and I'm still not quite used to this.
5. If you have a spare USB mouse lying around I would connect it to the Mac and tuck it away somewhere hidden, you'll want it to diagnose any issues. I have heard reports of screen savers sticking as well, but haven't personally experienced any issue.

Download Synergy


Installing the iPhone SDK

Once your Mac is setup the next step is to install the iPhone SDK. You can download the iPhone SDK by visiting the Apple iPhone Dev Center. You will need to register for a free iPhone Developer account to download the SDK. The download is over 1GB in size, so be prepared to hang out for a few minutes while that finishes.

Once you have the SDK downloaded, installing is a snap. Actually, to be honest, it hung twice on me the first two-times I tried installing it. However, a couple of force-quits and a restart later, it installed fine. I installed by selecting all of the available packages, but left the install path and any other settings to their default values/locations. If you would like to get "crafty" with your install there is an 'iPhone SDK Readme' PDF located under the Downloads section of the iPhone Dev Center.

The SDK includes all of the essential applications you need to develop iPhone Applications. Apple calls it "iPhone SDK and Xcode 3.1 Developer Tools for Mac OS X v10.5.3". Xcode is the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that you will be getting cozy with throughout the development cycle.

My next post will pick up from this point, where your system is all setup and you have the iPhone SDK installed.