Apple has released a new SDK specifically for iPad. It’s not yet ready for prime-time, so if you want to continue to develop for iPhone, you’ll need to use both the old and new SDKs for awhile. Curious about the logistics of this endeavor, I googled up this article. I dutifully followed the instructions and installed the beta 1 release in a separate dev directory. Yeah, I’m calling shenanigans. It did not work. I think it’s a bit irresponsible to post something like that without having tried it.
You can’t completely separate the two SDKs. According to the release notes, the one that is installed last is the one whose compilers will be used for both. I had other problems as well. Both the old and new device simulators were crashy. So I completely wiped both sets of dev tools and reinstalled the iPhone SDK.
Recently, Apple released beta 2 of the iPad SDK. They may have fixed the problems I experienced before, but I’m not taking any more chances. This time, I got myself an external Firewire hard drive. USB 2.0 would also work, but I prefer Firewire for a possibly frivolous reason: I have so many USB devices that it’s difficult to find a place to plug in a new one, but I have two Firewire ports on the back of my Cinema Display that are otherwise unused.
This next part is important. You’re going to need to boot off this drive, so its partition map scheme must be set to “GUID Partition Table.” If it isn’t, you should reinitialize it so that it is. On the Mac, you use the Disk Utility program for this. It doesn’t create GUID partition tables by default, so you have to press the button that says “Options…” and change it.
Next, use a program like Carbon Copy Cloner to make a copy of your primary hard drive onto the external drive. Finally, in System Preferences, pick “Startup Disk,” select your external hard drive, and reboot. Now install the new iPad SDK. It will be copied onto your external disk, leaving your primary disk alone. This way, the two SDKs won’t butt heads with each other.
It’s a shame that Apple is making us solve a software problem with hardware, but this is the sort of inconvenience you have to put up with if you want to live on the bleeding edge. I can’t even remember the last time I had to use the Startup Disk pref pane before this. It’s been years, surely. This reminds me of when I used to work at Be, and we had a new version of BeOS to install every couple of weeks.