Need help with Xcode 3 and SDK

Roberto Aramburu's icon

Hi,
Im a complete noob when it comes to this, I bought Eric Lyon's book and it arrived today. The book says I should install Xcode3(I did, I'm still running OSX 10.5.8) and download the Max/Msp SDK and Im stuck there. When I try to run the mirror~ example I get an error that says "there is no SDK at specified SDKROOT path 'Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk'"

I feel silly trying to learn how to code externals but can't even make the IDE to work... help?

Eric Lyon's icon

Sadly, dealing with the SDK environment can be challenging, and it changes often enough that such information in a book is guaranteed to go obsolete quickly. (I wrote about that likelihood in the text.) It is possible to get things working on Xcode 3, but I would strongly encourage you to upgrade to the latest version of OSX, download Xcode 4 (free), and see this thread, which will help you get up to speed on compiling for Xcode 4:

And please keep posting, if you run into further difficulties.

Eric

Roberto Aramburu's icon

From what I see in the Mac App Store Xcode 4 runs on Mountain Lion which I don't have.
So I guess I'll have to wait until I can afford an upgrade to read your book,.
why is xcode so complicated? I don't have these issues developing on DevC++, oh well...

Thank you for your time anyway, I really apreciatte it.

Nikolas K's icon

if you have an apple developer account, you can download Xcode 4.2 for Snow Leopard. You will not find it at the app store, just on the developer.apple.com at the developer downloads i think.

Eric Lyon's icon

why is xcode so complicated?

It's true that life was simpler back when we just had directories of C code and a Makefile. But it's not that much worse now. There are really only two things you need to figure out with Xcode:

1) How to install it on your system. That's trivially easy for the current OSX. It's a bit more complicated for older systems. But if you want to develop code, it really is a good idea to keep your OS up-to-date.

2) How to work with Xcode. Again it's really not that hard. You just need to get your code files into the current project format (always available from Cycling '74), and then build the project.

With persistence, you will succeed. Getting started does take more effort than writing a Max patch, but I think the rewards are worth the effort.