Martin’s Blog

Due to the lack of use my iMac gets these days I’ve decided to put it up for sale on eBay.

However I still want a Mac around in order to develop future iPhone apps, so I decided to try and install Mac OS on my PC.

I started out trying to use the iAkatos disk however as with previous attempts using this disk, I couldn’t even make it to the installer due to a lack of IDE controller support for my motherboard among other things. This forced me to move on to the Kalyway disk which surprisingly worked first time!

I set about installing Mac OS (10.5.2) onto an external 250gb drive, this worked pretty well and I was able to boot into Mac OS within half an hour of putting the disk in. However I didn’t customize the install and so I didn’t have multiple monitor support or any sort of decent graphics. I choose to reinstall, selecting the correct driver but later found out i could probably have just dumped the right kext into the system.

Following this i ran the Kalyway 10.5.3 Combo update and successfully upgraded with no problems, there are plenty of guides around but the basic process was to run a task that looped, looking to delete a kext whilst the installer ran.

The next step was to install the 10.5.4 update that I grabbed from the Apple site. No problems with this one i believe - the usual reboot then -v -f -x switches. The same process was carried out in order to install 10.5.5, slow and tedious i know.

I stopped at 10.5.5 as I couldn’t find any guides on installing 10.5.6 and didn’t fancy putting all my hard work to waste - I think if i installed 10.5.6 i would run into problems with EFI.

The final step was to get the graphics up and running at full power. After some Googling and playing, I choose to give NVKush a try. This worked great and was much easier than trying to hack around with NVInject. Quartz Extreme works fine and so all the animation works great

I’m loving using Mac OS on my quad core machine and find myself booting into Mac OS every time i boot up! If only Apple would sell Mac OS for other platforms or at least introduce a Live DVD to get people hooked!

I’m on the search for new ideas for apps to write for the iPhone just for enjoyment - something I can whip up in an afternoon would be nice.

I’ve just had an idea, but I’m not sure if there’s something similar already floating around…

The basic idea goes something along the lines of hide and seek with strangers. Someone may leave a message (paper or some other physical thing), object or anything, open the app and mark the objects location. The user could then write a few clues and post it to the server. Following this, anyone within a given radius could be sent a clue to where the prize/message is. I think it would be pretty fun to play!

The idea came about when I thought about how Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails used Google Maps to mark where he had hidden some concert tickets for fans to find. I believe there’s some sort of similar concept on an episode of Numb3rs.

I think it would be pretty hard to get the idea to take off, and there may be some problems that always come with user submitted content but there’s opportunity.

Much has happened since my last post, and I didn’t keep up the blogging – no shock there.

I managed to get my hands on a mint condition iMac for a very good price, it’s the model just before they made them silver. Nice little thing, the iMac, it would be nice to ditch the PC but it would be too expensive to replace with the equivalent Mac.

The first day of getting the Mac up and running saw me install Synergy and the iPhone SDK, everything I shall ever need for the Mac! Synergy is a pretty handy app, albeit a little painful to setup and install. This allows me to keep my desk clear and use the keyboard on my Windows machine to develop on the Mac too.

Within a few days development had begun on MovieStar (checkout my project page) – my native IMDb search tool. Prior this point I had no experience with Cocoa or Objective-C, besides the fact that I’d only used Mac’s occasionally. The first few weeks of getting to grips with the new language and development environment were hard, but the odd syntax gradually came to me.

The link between the Interface Builder and the code was a little hard to fathom at first, where if you accidently connect the wrong components or outlets the app just crashes with little clue as to why. This brings me on to XCode’s error handling – what’s going on there? The majority of crashes give you NO error message at all, XCode just starts up GDB and shrugs.

XCode isn’t all bad though, if you look past the fact you can’t rename a project easily. The API look up tool is pretty handy and I do like the code auto completion, although it’s a little hard to get used to coming from Netbeans and similar tools.

Expect to see MovieStar on the AppStore at the end of September of sometime in October – I hope!