Dipping my toes

I have always been a Windows person. It's not an ideological thing. It just turned out that way. Of course, ten years spent at Microsoft did rather tend to reinforce the habit.

Lately I have been thinking that I should dip my toes in the iPhone waters. Sip a different Kool Aid. I downloaded the XCode IDE from Apple and was about to install it when it occurred to me that it might not work on Windows. Phew. One red face narrowly averted.

It's not terribly surprising that you would need a Mac to do iPhone development. After all the dev tools for Windows on mobile platforms all run on Windows.

I spent a little time perusing sites to do with hacking vanilla PCs to run Mac OS but decided that could consume way more time than I really wanted. So I had to buy a Mac.

Buying a Mac turned out to be more difficult than you might imagine in Auckland, a city of more than one million people. None of the stores appear to carry stock of the MacBook that I wanted or stock of iPod Touch of any kind. (Given the insane pricing of iPhones in New Zealand and the apps I am thinking of, an iPod Touch is sufficient). I ended up ordering online and having a machine within 48 hours.

I can see that using a Mac will take a little getting used although I am really only interested in XCode. A good friend, a true Mac aficionado, assures me I will soon be seduced. Maybe so. But I did just buy three copies of Office 2007 and one copy of Visual Studio 2008 to go on some of my home machines.

As with any new machine, the first hour is spent ripping out stuff that I don't care for -- shortcuts to Garage Band, movie making software etc -- and tweaking preferences. Then I have to train myself to use that clover leaf key. And to figure out where PgDn is. Anyway, I am now cutting code. My "Hello World" app runs in the simulator!