So along with a few folks here around Hopkins we have been kicking around the idea of developing an app for the iPhone/Android. I’ll leave the details out for now (other than to say stay tuned!).
But to start developing an app for the iPhone, you need a version of Xcode, Apple’s development environment. The latest version of Xcode is version 4, which can only be installed with the latest version of Mac OS X Lion (10.7, I think) and above. So I dutifully went off to download Lion. Except, whoops! You can only download Lion from the Mac App store.
Now this wouldn’t be a problem, if you didn’t need OS X Snow Leopard (10.6 and above) to access the App store. Turns out I only have version 10.5 (must be OS X Housecat or something). I did a little searching and it looks like the only way I can get Lion is if I buy Snow Leopard first and upgrade to upgrade!
It isn’t the money so much (although it does suck to pay $60 for $30 worth of software), but the time and inconvenience this causes. Apple has done this a couple of times to me in the past with operating systems needing to be upgraded so I can buy things from iTunes. But this is getting out of hand….maybe I need to consider the alternatives.