This forum post explained through the pain of others how I lost an evening attempting to install Oracle.

Oracle installation links the various binaries against the specifics of the local machine. By default, Tiger dev tools enables gcc 4.0, which breaks the link process with a heap of errors.

Switch to gcc 3.0 using:

sudo gcc_select 3.3

And it won’t show any errors, but still won’t work. The issue is that Oracle 10g depends on some Panther specific libraries.

The only solution at the moment seems to be install on an Mac OS X 10.3 machine and then either upgrade it, or copy the install to a 10.4 machine (and under no circumstances re-link on 10.4).

Until Oracle releases an update of course.

PyObjC adds support for Tiger specific technologies - however not in the current released build. You currently need to grab the source via subversion.

First, download subversion for Mac OS X from Martin Ott’s site. The 10.3 installer seems to work okay for 10.4.

Second, follow the instructions for downloading the PyObjC source:

svn co http://svn.red-bean.com/pyobjc/trunk/pyobjc/

Finally, follow the installation instructions. The short version is:

cd pyobjc
python setup.py bdist_mpkg --open

And then follow the instructions in the installer.

The Introduction to Cocoa Bindings over at CocoaDevCentral provides a good example as to how useful Cocoa Bindings actually are.

My initial aim for this site is to follow my progress of figuring out how to write a Cocoa application using Python. This is entirely possible at the moment, but not well documented, especially if you want to use Cocoa Bindings.

Many things came together all at once to motivate this. Firstly, I started learning Python, secondly, Tiger re-enthused me about OS/X development and thirdly, I finally gave up on my Palm so need to replace HappyDays. HappyDays is a simple application that tracks birthdays and provides reminders, but does it by leveraging existing contacts and calendars.

Update: Tiger provides the integration of the actual birthday into iCal, however does not provide all the functionality that HappyDays does. Given that the primary aim is learning how to write the app, with the app being a side effect, we are still in good shape.