iphone development-leopard or snow leopard?

Question

i am planning start my iphone development, and i have a iMac with tiger 10.4 OS version, planning to upgrade to Leopard 10.5.6 OS X, but i heard apple going to release the Snow Leopard in september, will development environment shift to snow leopard instead of leopard,and Leopard 10.5.7 no longer be used to development?is now a good timing to upgrade?

Answer 1

What OS is on your Mac is immaterial to the iPhone development. You need to upgrade, either now or in the future, to start iPhone development. Either you upgrade to Leopard now and start now and pay the $29 to upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard when it comes out, or you lose significant development lead time waiting for Snow Leopard and save a whole $29. It's your call, but to me, getting your app into the app store earlier is worth a lot more than $29.

However, you probably want to get the GM for iPhone OS 3.0 because that's what will be shipping with new phones very shortly and Apple is going to demand that new apps in the app store are 3.0 compatible.

Answer 2

Yes, because even if you buy Leopard now it will only cost you $29 to upgrade to Snow Leopard.

When you join the iPhone Developer Program you'll get access to iPhone SDK for Leopard and now Leopard.

Answer 3

I think the chances of Apple supporting Leopard for any significant length of time after Snow Leopard comes out is very slim for a product like XCode - certainly in the past Apple have been happy to require the latest Mac OS X for it. So it's safe to assume going to have to get Snow Leopard soon anyway.

It's up to you whether you buy Leopard now (and later the $29 upgrade) or can wait until Snow Leopard comes out.

Answer 4

You'll want Snow Leopard anyway for the features it offers when using XCode in that environment.

Answer 5

Obviously, to be able to develop for iPhone at all, you must have at least Leopard. If you have a PowerPC iMac, Leopard is the highest you'll be able to go anyway — Snow Leopard is Intel-only.

As far as needing to upgrade past Leopard, realize that what works on Leopard will continue to work on Leopard — Apple won't suddenly remove the ability to develop for iPhone on Leopard just because Snow Leopard is released. There may be new features that are only available in the newest Xcode tools on Snow Leopard, but Leopard and Xcode 3.1.x will continue to support what they do now.

As far as the timeline for upgrading, if your iMac is an Intel, waiting until Snow Leopard is released can get you 10.6 plus iLife and iWork for $169, rather than paying $129 now and $29 to upgrade in September. However, you won't be able to do any iPhone development from your machine as long as it runs only Tiger. If you happen to be brand-new to Cocoa in general, it might pay off to get some solid Objective-C programming under your belt in the meantime by writing some simple desktop apps, etc. You can also learn a lot about iPhone programming even without writing your own code, although doing is far better than reading.

Answer 6

Its better to start programming with Leopard itself. The upgrade should not be a constraint as you may be able to create a application by then.

Learn iPhone Programming at http://EDUmobile.ORG/iphone-course.html

Answer 7

If you have access to Snow Leopard Beta developer release, you may want to start there. There are many great improvements in XCode 3.2 and it only runs under Snow Leopard.

The important thing to consider is not necessarily the host OS, but the iPhone OS. OS 3.0 will be out soon and there are many changes from 2.2. So a bigger question is which iPhone OS to develop for.

Short of that, I wouldn't wait. That's 3 months of development that you could be working on your project. Go to Leopard and XCode 3.1, develop your code. Upgrading to Snow Leopard will be $29. If your app gets to the store 3 months sooner, it will have been worth it.

Answer 8

I would suggest if you are ready to start with the iPhone then do it now rather than wait until Snow Leopard is released. Nothing like momentum to get things done quick...:).

The suggestion from Ramin above is also a good compromise perhaps if you can get the Beta of Snow Leopard. But otherwise I would just get started with Leopard now.

Good luck!

Answer 9

The SDK for the much anticipated iPad is Snow Leopard only. I guess that's enough reason to upgrade directly to Snow. :)

Answer 10

The key advantages of Snow Leopard are:

• Only Snow Leopard supports the V3.2 beta SDK, required for iPad development.
• Only Snow Leopard supports the newest Xcode version, which has some new features (the main one that comes to mind is the CLANG static analyser, which gives a 'Build and Analyse' to statically analyse your code for common programming errors).

The key disadvantage:

• Snow Leopard does not support building for V2.x iPhone OSes (e.g. reference here). When I tried running apps in the Snow Leopard V2.x Simulator, I hit the error below.

---

dyld: Symbol not found: __CFStringGetUserDefaultEncoding  
  Referenced from: /System/Library/Frameworks/SystemConfiguration.framework/Versions/A/SystemConfiguration
  Expected in: /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator3.0.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/Versions/A/CoreFoundation
 in /System/Library/Frameworks/SystemConfiguration.framework/Versions/A/SystemConfiguration