Is MPLAB mac compatible

[JamesBrown]

Hey i was just wondering if any one knew if MPLAB is mac compatable, I am supposed to start teaching the team programming tomorrow but one of the girls has a mac, will this work, if not can any one suggest a simmilar IDE that will work

[Tristan Lall]

Not natively. You might be able to make it work under an emulator.

Does the Mac even have a serial port, or would an adapter be necessary?

Edit: Some searching of the ChiefDelphi archives yielded this (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=202685&postcount=3), which suggests that Virtual PC under OS 10 with a USB to RS-232 adapter can be made to work. Virtual PC is not free software.

Edit: Reading the original post once more, I'm wondering if you just need a C IDE. Do you plan to actually download code, or merely want to familiarize them with what works in C (but not necessarily on the PIC)?

[Greg McCoy]

Does the Mac even have a serial port, or would an adapter be necessary?

You need to buy a serial adapter (http://www.keyspan.com/products/homepage-Serial.spml), just like most new PCs.

If only Microchip would build their compiler for PowerPC...

All of the tools run perfectly under Virtual PC 7 though, just like every other Windows application I've tried.

Sometime next year, Intel-based Macs will come out, so this shouldn't be an issue for long.

[JamesBrown]

So MPLAB wont run (I assumed that)

I am only looking for an IDE all of the actual PIC programming will be done in the Computer lab/ on my laptop. For this reason she doesnt need a serial port.

I guess I should ask what every one recommends for an IDE for a mac, preferably free and simmilar to either Visual Studio or MPLAB since these are the two that I am familiar with.

[Greg McCoy]

Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/) will run just fine, which is what some people use as an alternative to MPLAB on Windows machines. I suppose you could use Apple's Xcode as well (which is on one of your Mac OS X discs), though it is certainly geared for Mac development. Any plain old text editor will work as far as editing the code, but sadly to compile you'll need an x86, real or emulated.

If you're just looking for something to show a project with a group of files, I guess I would recommend using Xcode or Eclipse, both are free. TextMate (http://macromates.com/) is another possibility, it can show an outline of files and has some neat features, but it's about $50.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

[JamesBrown]

Thanks Gregg that helps I found a copy of eclipse for her.

Thanks for your help every one.