Setting up Cinder on Mac OS X is relatively easy if you have done some coding before—that means, if you have Xcode installed. If not, you have to download and install it. To do that get yourself an Apple Developer Account from https://developer.apple.com/programs/register/.

Once you have your Apple Developer ID and password, go to the Xcode download section at https://developer.apple.com/xcode/ or open up the App Store application and search for the Xcode application there.

The process of installing Xcode is not a topic that we will be covering in this book, but it should be quite self-explanatory as Apple has a long history of making their applications as user friendly as possible. If you encounter problems with installing Xcode, try Google or go to the official Apple Developer Xcode FAQ located at https://developer.apple.com/support/xcode/.

So now you have Xcode installed on your computer! Let's move on and unarchive the downloaded Cinder package at a safe location, for example, /Users/Your_User-name/cinder. In my case, the path is /Users/kr15h/cinder.

Next, we are going to test if our newly created setup is working by opening one of the sample applications. We will try out the QuickTime sample application. To do that open the file quickTimeSample.xcodeproj (QuickTimeBasic.xcodeproj in Cinder 0.8.5) in the cinder/samples/QuickTime/xcode/ directory (cinder/samples/QuickTimeBasic/xcode/ in Cinder 0.8.5). In Xcode, select Build | Build and Run (Product | Run on Xcode 4+). You can achieve the same effect by pressing Cmd + R or by clicking on the Build and Run (simply Run in Xcode 4+) button in the toolbar (you can recognize it by a round green play button that is placed over a grayscale hammer or a round gray play button in Xcode 4+).

An Open File dialog should pop up. Go and select a movie file from your hard drive!

If you see the movie playing back in a window, success! You are ready to move on to the next chapter. If not, try to follow the steps mentioned in this section more carefully—maybe you did not notice something.