Mac on Lenovo

Franki just did the most amazing thing by installing OS X - 10.6 on a Lenovo. He tried out with Pally Sir's CD at first but that did not go well. I would confer with him and convince him to write about the set up and hacks here. Stay Tuned.

The XCode IDE

The first demo of the Workstreamr app was given on Friday and Monday. Just before the Friday demo, Manish had a small announcement to make. To try to build a client, as the client we currently are building, that would run on an Apple iPhone. The reward would be an iPhone itself (so ha says) ! I, along with others were definitely interested. The browsed through the latest SDK that Apple had released for the iPhone and came to understand that the SDK needed a Mac for the development. That clearly justified my buying a Mac !!

I downloaded the SDK. A 1.3 Gb dmg file ! When installed, I found my XCode IDE overwritten with the new XCode version IDE which supported the iPhone development. I even downloaded podcasts with the Apple Evangelists giving excellent tips and tricks on iPhone based development. As I have only done development for the desktop, it was necessary to understand that it was not the same thing. Development in a phone which has memory and power constraints in tricky. The consistency and accuracy to be followed is extremely important.

I also came to know that the development language for independent apps in the iPhone was Objective C, a ANSI C based superset. The constructs are different and sometimes confusing. I like the part where messages are passed for method calls, it reminded me of Ruby. I am still trying to get in grips with this language for further development.

I was mesmerized by the development platform that Apple provided. XCode for app development, DashCode for web based development, Instruments for performance analysis. The iPhone development does not has the Interface Builder support yet but once it comes there no beating the toolkit.

Looking forward to some excellent programming on Objective C now !!!

Working with my MAC

Yeh .. At last after fighting all the inner pulls and pushes, I have got a small MacBook. Not Pro, just the lesser of the laptops. Its my first time actually doing something on a Mac. But good friend Rajeesh helped me with some things but I need to get into the BSD (Darwin) shell and all the installations, applications that are possible in the system. Its a Leopard with 2GHz and 1Gb Ram. The HDD is just 80Gb but I intend to have an external Hard drive as well. Now I read what Cocoa, Carbon, AppleScript, Xcode etc were. But to get an idea I have to try something out. Its still early days and the console is the major thing to explore. Added most of the best rated softwares and looking for more great stuff. The UI is great. The XCode IDE is great as well. The Expose and Spaces are also nice, reminds me of the Fedore Core that used to use.

I am trying my hands with MacPorts and it looks very complex. Great Ruby On Rails, Java and python support. I am currently working in RoR and I feel this system would give me more that I ever wanted. I was disappointed when I understood that TextMate (on which the major RoR development is done worldwide) is to be paid for. I choose to have Aptana and develop in that IDE. I will download Eclipse and see if I get Red hat Developer Studio to work with Mac.

With my minimal interaction I feel that Mac is not devoid of viruses. How is that possible (the admin rights asking for execution of programsis great) when it uses executables? Have to investigate. Lots of questions to be answered thou. And I feel I would love using the Mac.