So… you’ve installed the latest SDK and XCode from Apple’s developer site only to find out that the only base SDK’s you are left to develop with are 3.2 and 4.0. What about if you have an iPhone 2G as your only development device? The iPhone 2G only goes up to iOS 3.1.3 and if you are stuck with the lowest base SDK of 3.2, you will not be able to push your apps to your iPhone.

This is exactly what happened to me. I downloaded the beta SDK for the 4.0 iOS when it came out. Little did I know that when you install that, it removes all SDK’s prior to 3.2.

Luckily for us, Apple is kind enough to keep previous versions of Xcode and their SDK’s available for download. Here is a list of available downloads.

• iPhone SDK 2.2.1
• iPhone SDK 3.0 with Xcode 3.1.3 – Leopard
• iPhone SDK 3.0 with Xcode 3.2 – Snow Leopard
• iPhone SDK 3.1 with Xcode 3.1.4 – Leopard
• iPhone SDK 3.1 with Xcode 3.2.1 – Snow Leopard
• iPhone SDK 3.1.2 with Xcode 3.1.4 – Leopard
• iPhone SDK 3.1.2 with Xcode 3.2.1 – Snow Leopard
• iPhone SDK 3.1.3 with Xcode 3.1.4 – Leopard
• iPhone SDK 3.1.3 with Xcode 3.2.1 – Snow Leopard
• iPhone SDK 3.2 Beta 4 with Xcode 3.2.2 – Snow Leopard
• iPhone SDK 3.2 FInal with Xcode 3.2.2 – Snow Leopard

You have to be logged into the Apple developer site http://developer.apple.com to download the above listed SDK’s. I downloaded the 3.1.3 Snow Leopard SDK since I already have 3.2 and 4.0 and 3.1.3 includes all of the above mentioned SDK’s as well as 2.0 and 2.1.

Once you’ve downloaded the SDK of your choice it should be in the form of a DMG, go ahead and mount that and open up the resulting volume. You should get something that looks like the image below.

At this point you will need to open up the Packages folder rather then running the installer because all we want are the SDK’s. When you open up the Packages folder scroll down a bit until you see the SDK’s. You should see something similar to the screen shot below.

You’ll see that there are device SDK’s and simulator SDK’s. You don’t have to install the simulator SDK’s if you don’t want to because all we are really after here is to be able to push our apps to an iPhone with an iOS earlier then 3.2. Double click on one of the iPhone SDK’s and you will be presented with an installer screen like the one below.

Click on Continue and and you will get to the next screen similar to the one in the screen shot below

On this screen you need to click on the drive you want to install the SDK to. In most cases it will be your primary Hard Drive. If you have your Developer tools installed on a different drive then you should select that one instead. Next you need to click on Choose Folder and you will be presented with a Choose Folder dialog similar to the screen shot below.

If you are like me and installed Xcode in the default location then you should have a developer folder in the root of your Hard Drive. Click on the Developer folder and then click choose. You will see a screen similar to the one below.

You can verify on this screen that you’ve selected the proper folder. It should have a blue circle around the Hard Drive and if you’ve picked the Developer folder it should say the following on the bottom “You have chosen to install this software in the folder Developer on the disk Macintosh HD. Click Continue and you will be presented with a screen similar to the below screen shot.

This is just a confirmation screen, from here you just need to click on Install. You may be prompted with a password screen. Enter your password to continue with the installation. You should see a screen similar to the one below.

Depending on the SDK you are installing this part can take up to 5 minutes to complete. When the installation is done you will be presented with a screen similar to the one below.

Click on close. At this time your installation of the SDK is complete. You can verify that the SDK installed successfully by launching Xcode. Once Xcode is launched open an existing project or start a new one and go to Project -> Project Settings. You should see a screen similar to the below screen shot.

Click on the drop down towards the bottom where you can choose your base SDK and if all went well you should see a screen similar to the below depending on which SDK you installed.

Pick your SDK of choice and enjoy. Hopefully this tutorial has helped someone with their project. I spent many hours the other night researching how I could install older version SDK’s and once I found an easy method I thought I would share it with the rest of the world. If for some reason you don’t see your SDK listed here then it may have been installed in the wrong folder. If you can’t get it working feel free to ask me for help. I’m always willing to help out a fellow developer.

Well, I’m at it again, after developing the ISOx360 and Wii Tools, I thought about what else might be a useful tool for all of the fellow Mac OS X users out there. One thing that came to mind was that most of the HD content that can be found on the internet is usually in MKV format.

I wont cover the MKV format in-depth, just know that it is a container and not a codec, similar to how an AVI can be encoded as a divx or an xvid, an MKV file can use many different codecs. Most commonly MKV files contain the H.264 / X.264 codec for Video and the DTS / AC3 codec for audio.

The other thing you need to know about MKV files and HD content is that a typical 720P MKV file using an H.264 codec has a max bit-rate of about 9000, currently the AppleTV can only support 720P content with a Video bit-rate of up to 5000. If this limitation didn’t exist we could easily transcode the file to an MP4 / M4V container, but because of the Video limitation, we need to re-encode the file at a lower bit-rate. Don’t worry about quality, I haven’t seen any noticeable decrease in quality when re-encoding.

So, enough with the tech talk, you’re probably wondering, the title of the post is Convert MKV to MP4 on a Mac, so I’ll get on with it. The application that I’ve developed makes this an easy 1 step process. You load the MKV file, choose a save location for the new MP4 file, pick a few options and click convert. When its done, you can copy the MP4 file to your AppleTV / iTunes and enjoy great quality HD content.

Note: My application will also remove subtitles and convert any DTS audio track to AC3 so that you can keep all the surround sound. The thing is, to enjoy the surround sound, you’ll have to use the optical output on your AppleTV and have a receiver that can correctly decode the audio, along with a nice set of surround sound speakers.

You can download a trial of the application below, it will work exactly 10 times before it is rendered useless at which point you will have to purchase it, but don’t worry I kept the price cheap, only $14.95.

Download :

  Click to Download the MKV2AppleTV Trial (9.4 MiB, 338 hits)

Purchase:
Click to Purchase an MKV2AppleTV License

At the request of one of my readers, I am making a short tutorial on how to burn activate.iso on Mac OS X. This is a fairly simple process, however I will cover it in as much detail as possible.

Tools Needed:

The activate.iso file ( Download )
Disk Utility (  Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility )
A Blank Dual Layer DVD

The Tutorial:

Download the activate.iso file from the above list of tools. Once downloaded, you need to extract it, since it will be in a compressed zip format.

Open Disk Utility ( Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility ) – you should see a screen similar to the below

Click on Burn, you will see a browse window similar to the image below, browse to the location where you downloaded and extracted the activate.iso file. Highlight activate.iso, then click on Burn.

After clicking on Burn, the browse dialog will disappear and you will see a new window, similar to the following image. At this point you will need to insert your disk. When Disk Utility recognizes that a blank dual layer disk has been inserted, it will enable the Burn button. All you need to do now is click Burn.

After the burn has completed you will most likely need to reboot your Mac to remove the disk since for me anyway OS X did not recognize that there was a disk in the drive after the burn completed and therefore did not let me eject the disk while I was in the operating system. So what you need to do is reboot your Mac and eject the disk using the eject button before your Mac boots back up completely.

So that’s it for the tutorial, nothing special, just use good old Disk Utility to burn and you’re all set.

I recently acquired a white G3 eMac with a 17 inch screen and thought it would be perfect to put into my daughters room. Unfortunately the eMacs didn’t come with built in airports, so no wireless. I looked around online for wireless cards that would work with a Mac and found that they are quite expensive.

Instead of purchasing a wireless adapter online, I went to Wal-Mart and bought a Belkin Wireless USB adapter. After getting home and opening the box, I noticed that there are no Mac drivers on the included CD, furthermore after searching Belkin’s website returned no results for any available Mac drivers for this particular adapter.

After some more searching on google, I found a few sites with drivers for this card for a Mac, but only to find out that there are multiple versions of this particular card. You can use the version matrix below to determine your version.

Version 1 – FCC ID = K7SF5D7050
Version 2 – FCC ID = K7SF5D7050A
Version 3 – FCC ID = K7SF5D7050B
Version 4 – FCC ID = RAXWN4501H
Version 5 – FCC ID = K7SF5D7050E

This article will cover installing Version 4 of the F5D7050 adapter. Although, I will also be listing available drivers for Versions 1, 2, and 3. The Version 4 driver may also work for the Version 5 adapter, although this has not been tested, and if anyone tries and succeeds, I would appreciate a comment to let everyone know.

F5D7050 Version 1 & 2 Mac Driver
F5D7050 Version 3 Mac Driver
F5D7050 Version 4 Mac Driver

Each of these drivers is installed in much the same way, there is an install file that you run and then restart the Mac when the install has completed. After the Mac restarts you have to click on System Preferences and click on Network. You’ll receive a pop-up dialog alerting you that a new network device has been detected. Apply the change and then start the wireless utility if it hasn’t been started already. Scan for wireless networks, when your network has been found, connect to it.

That’s all there is to it. The install is very simple and straight forward. If anyone has any input / advice, feel free to post for others to read.

This was giving me a problem some days ago so I thought I’d write up a quick tutorial on how to shrink dmg files on a mac. Why would you want to do this ? Well lets say you are creating an application and you want to package it in a DMG so you open up Disk Utility and create a blank image. Well you can only choose certain sizes. Most of us would choose a 40MB image so we have plenty of initial space to work with.

As far as I know there are 2 methods for shrinking the dmg down to the size of its contents, they are listed below.

Method – 1:

• Right Click on the DMG
• Click Compress

This will generate a zip file down to the actual size of the content of the DMG since free space has 100% compression ratio.

Method – 2:

This method involves the use of the Terminal App which can be found under Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal

• Launch Terminal
• Type the following hdiutil resize -size 10M /Path/To/DMG/DMG_Name.dmg

Code Breakdown:

• hdiutil – A utility that comes preinstalled with Mac OS X, that manipulates disk images, etc…
• -size – An argument passed to hdiutil, indicating that you want to change the size of an image.
• 10M – means I am changing the dmg size to 10 Megabytes, insert your own value here.
• The rest should be self explanitory

So there you have it, 2 methods to resize your dmg in Mac OS X. Thanks for reading.

If anyone would benefit from having a little GUI App that resizes DMG’s let me know, if I receive enough requests, I might make one and post it here.