I’m getting an iPhone!

For development, of course! However, I do not yet own a macbook of any kind, so I was mostly stuck in what to do. Apparently, KDevelop supports Objective-C, but it seems as if the mac platform is THE platform for obj-c development. I generally despise OSX, but I’m learning to accept its windowing system and even ENJOY it in certain circumstances! First-class windows in all apps seems unwieldy at first, but you really begin to appreciate the ability to put ANY window from ANY application ANYWHERE. Such just isn’t feasible in Windows, but Windows 7 seems to aid this with proper docking of windows.

So, then, how am I learning Objective-C with Xcode to lead into iPhone dev? Simply put, VMWare.

Here’s how I did it:

1. Obtain iPC OSx86 10.5.6 Universal PPF5 (Final).iso and the latest version of VMWare.
2. Set up the hard disk for OSX. Allocate AT LEAST 25GB. I allocated as much and currently have 8GB remaining. Use the default SCSI hard drive option. Also make sure to choose
   FreeBSD 64-bit as the guest OS and select “bridged networking.”
3. Before booting the VM for the first time, edit the disk image’s .vmx configuration file. Change guestOS=freebsd-64 to guestOS=darwin-64
4. Mount the OSX image in D-tools or your mounter of choice and set the CD drive in vmware to the mounted image. Do NOT use vmware to mount the image; this won’t work.
5. Boot the VM. Go to Disk Utilities and select erase. The hard drive will be formatted for installation of OSX.
6. Back out of disk utilities and continue the install as normal. You can select various installation customizations, but I chose none and was successful in installation.
7. DO NOT UNMOUNT THE DISC IMAGE, despite OSX’s plea. Restart normally. You will NEED to have the DVD image mounted to boot OSX. If you do not have the image on boot, you’ll get an “Operating System Not Found” error and won’t be able to continue the boot.
8. Set the network connection type to “NAT.”
9. Configure OSX, and enjoy . You should be able to run Software Updater to move to 10.5.7 without issue.

Phew. I tried 2 10.5.7 images on vmware and hardware, and after deciding that enabling AHCI in an existing XP partition was impossible without a floppy drive, I conceded to the fact that VMWare was the only way to go. Now, though, I’m rocking out with OSX, and you should too! Make sure to actually get a mac at some point; while the VM is mostly stable, I’ve had some instability issues with Preview after installing Safari 4. To avoid such weirdness, just buy a mac!

jQuery plugins coming.