Boot Mac OS X from External Drive

Although a tad bit off topic, it’s Mac related none-the-less. I am in the midst of backing up my MacBook Pro to a remote drive as I’ll be buying one of the new machines recently announced by Apple.

As part of the process, I am creating an image of my current system on a USB drive, using the Disk Utility application. The idea is to create a bootable image on the USB drive, verify that I can boot from the drive and use that image for the new machine. If all goes well, the process of configuring my new system such be nothing more than restoring the image on USB to the new system, in theory.

iPhone Mockups with Photoshop

Geoff Teehan at teehan+lax sent me a link to a Photoshop PSD file they created to help quickly create mockups of iPhone applications.

If you’ve spent any amount of time scrambling to create a prototype, you’ll greatly appreciate how much tools such as this can help. The screenshot below gives you an idea of how the assets look in Photoshop.

Here is a link to another PSD from 320480, which was the catalyst for Geoff and his team in creating their own tool.

JSON Framework

If you’ve found a need to work with JSON (including with the iPhone), I want to point you to an excellent Google code project: http://code.google.com/p/json-framework/.

This framework implements a strict JSON parser and generator in Objective-C. It’s easy to work with and can be used across any number of projects with ease.

iPhone & iPod Game Programming Forum

iDevGames has opened a message board for iPhone / iPod game development.

[source iDevGames]