When did I become Ron Penton?

Step one, go to Best Buy and purchase a copy of Snow Leopard.

Step two, go home and start the install of Snow Leopard on Mac mini.

Step three, watch half an hour of television.

Step four, realize that the “less than one minute” label has been showing for a good ten minutes.

Step five, do a system update. Twice.

Step six, try to learn something about NSOpenGLView while waiting for the system update to finish downloading.

Step seven, start downloading the iPhone SDK.

Step eight, turn the Mac back on after suffering a power outage due to a storm.

Step nine, start the iPhone SDK download again.

Step ten, go to bed, because you are out of time.

Additional Mac Woes

So, I reinstalled OSX. It took hours, as the installer kept having some sort of error somewhere in theinstaller. I disabled everything except for the absolutely required items, and it finally worked!

And then I went to download the iPhone SDK!

And then I found out that I need Snow Leopard, and I only have the non-Snowy Leopard!

Yesterday, Best Buy was closed (and I’m not interested in paying $4 for shipping), so I have to go and buy a new cat today, because my cat is no longer good.

In the meantime, I started putting together the software I wanted on the mac. I put in pixen, openoffice, xcode, qt, haxe, and scratch.

And yesterday evening, I spent some time trying to reacquaint myself with Cocoa and Interface Builder. I managed to wire up some buttons and textboxes.  I was able to nurse the ailing and little used IBOutlet neurons back to health.

I ended the evening trying to work with an NSOpenGLView. I found a set of tutorials to follow.

Mac Woes

I’ve been attempting to get my Mac Mini back up and operational.

For some reason, it refused to restart to apply a system update, and locked up more than a couple of times.

So, I backed up my stuff (there wasn’t much of it), and decided to reinstall OSX.

Bleh.

Can Anybody Suggest a Good KVM?

So, I find myself in need of migrating my current computer setup in my house.  The Mac Mini, which currently attaches to the TV and is the netflix client, needs to move into the “green room” so that I can do work on it.

The basement computer needs to be moved upstairs and attached to the TV so that it can become the new netflix client.

I need to update my iPhone SDK on the mac.

So far I have managed to do the following:

• Get the iPhone SDK DMG downloaded.
• Turn off the basement computer.

This is how things go when one only gets about 15 minutes at a shot to make things move along.

Life seems so asynchronous. No time to linger or focus on things.

I’m feeling grumpy about it, because it isn’t any fun.

At least for the time being, there will be two machines with two monitors and keyboards and mice, at least until I can find a decent and inexpensive two machine KVM.

My New Image Editing Tool

Originally, when I got my mac, I was using Paint.NET on my PC to generate or manipulate any art that I needed.

This has been a pain.

Yesterday, I tried Pixen.  While I’m still getting used to how it handles selections and such, it looks like its going to suit my need.

So I recommend this tool.

Far, Far Away

I’m in Saint Paul, Minnesota for a week of training for my job.

Which means I’ve got an ample opportunity to work on a game.

I brought my mac mini with me.  It’s small and travels well.

I arrived on Sunday night, and played at attempting to learn Interface Builder and Make It Work.

Over the course of two evenings, I can now confidently put controls onto the same exact form that comes in the view based application boilerplate.

However, putting multiple view resources into the application and having them load them and change between them is something that eludes me still.

So, I went back to hamquest.

I’ve been quite a distance from Objective-C for a while, but I’ve gotten back into the groove, and so the next three evenings should be productive.

However, I don’t much like not being home.  I prefer being at my house, in the company of my wife and dog, not some best western in the middle of a former train yard.

But so it goes.

It was (as we all know) inevitable.

JetLag on the iPhone (at least, on the iPhone simulator and written in Objective-C).

This brings the number of languages in which JetLag has been written to 8(I think – BASIC, Pascal, Assembly, C++, C#, Scratch, and Objective-C).