iPhone development

Bought a book on Beginning iOS Programming, by Nick Harris. This is a very good book imo. It directs you through the entire process of building a Bands application, which stores your favorite music bands, and allows you to search online about band information, find nearby stores in map, and listen to preview samples of the band's tracks on iTunes, it also allows you to share the band's information with other people by email or messages. So by following the book, you instantly build a full functional iPhone application with rather complex functionalities. - I got through the book in 3 weeks, with this finished Bands application on my iPhone.

But when started trying the example project, I found it's using Xcode 5 for iOS 7. The book didn't even mention which version of Xcode it's using.

I'm still running Xcode 4.1 on OS X 10.7.5, a.k.a OS X Lion. 10.8 is Mountain Lion, and 10.9 is Mavericks which was released on 10/22/2013. Mavericks is the first free upgrade of OS X. However there are quite some security media coverage on it.

Without a time machine to backup Lion, should I give up upgrading to Mavericks? After reading many of the terrible feedback on line I don't want to upgrade for now.

Why these major software upgrade prematurely only to replace stable old version and ruin their reputation and cause damage to their users? There is a point that when cross it it's overdone.

Maybe I'll stop working on iOS programming now and just concentrate on Android development.

Or let me try virtual machine. VirtualBox is free on Mac. Try to install VirtualBox and see if I can install OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion  and then upgrade to Maverick. Note that Mountain Lion needs to be 10.8.4 or above to run Xcode, so if it's 10.8.3 then you need to find the upgrade. Yikes! It works!  So now I can run Xcode 5.1 in Mountain Lion from VirtualBox on my Lion iMac!

About sharing files between host and guest, it can use the shared folder option in VirtualBox guest OS setting. This needs to install GuestExtension on the guest machine. The GuestExtension is often included in the OS X installation kit, or can be downloaded separately from http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/. However for Mac guest, there is no way to use shared folder this way, because GuestExtension is not available for Mac. So the alternative is to use file sharing on a network. For this, the guest machine should set network as "Bridged Network" instead of "NAT". Then the host and guest can share files on the local network. The file transfer speed can be as fast as hundreds of MB per second.

To remote desktop to PC from a mac, one needs to install Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac.

To install Mountain Lion on VMWare on PC seems hard. But use VirtualBox is fine.