How-To get iPhone SDK to work on PowerPC based Macs

Based on the analysis of the special event last week where Apple announced the details of their much awaited iPhone Software Development Kit, one of the issues I had mentioned in the In-Depth Coverage of Apple's iPhone Software Development Kit - Part 1 & Part 2 was that as a developer if you are still using PowerPC machines and you want to develop for iPhone, you'll not only need Leopard, but an Intel-based Mac to run the SDK.

However, if that had stopped you from developing the next cool iPhone Application then there is some good news for you as iPhone Atlas is reporting that with some minor modifications you can get the SDK to run on PowerPC-based Macs.

As per iPhone Altas the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) which is available as a free download from Apple's iPhone Development center (link here) will run on a PowerPC-based Mac if you omit the iPhone SDK-related files, installing only Xcode 3.1 beta and a series of other files.

They also go on to suggest that you use the shareware tool Pacifist which can be downloaded from this link, to force an installation of the entire SDK package on PowerPC-based Macs.

Here are some simple steps you need to follow courtesy iPhone Atlas:

• Drag the iPhone SDK package onto the Pacifist icon.
• Select the top entry, “Contents of iPhone SDK” as seen in the image below.
• Click the “Install” button in the upper-left corner and enter your administrator credentials.

The other important tool developers need is the iPhone Simulator which can be used to simulate the entire API stack so that they can debug the iPhone application right on their computer. That is also not an issue since the iPhone Simulator is a Universal Binary, so you will be able to get it to work on PowerPC-based Macs as well.

So that still leaves out Windows users, for whom as I had adviced in my previous post if you are really serious about taking a shot at the $100 million corpus fund created for iPhone Application Developers then it would be worthwhile to buy a Mac especially since you can install Windows as well.

Lets hope this tip/hack will help some developer who was restrained by the limitation to create a killer native iPhone application (and some of the credit should go to folks at iPhone Atlas for figuring this out).

If you are looking for ideas on which native iPhone application to develop, you don't need to look any further, just checkout the unauthorized native iPhone applications that have already been developed by smart and enterprising folks in the iPhone hacking community.

[via iPhone Atlas]

 

 

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