Let's walk through the process of getting Cinder running on your Mac OS X machine. You'll need XCode 4.4 or later, which you can download from Apple right here.
If you are using one of our packaged releases, you already have everything you need. If you're working from github you'll want to follow the build instructions in our Cinder + Git guide.
Let's try opening and building one of the samples. From the Finder, navigate to the cinder/samples/QuickTimeBasic folder and open xcode/quickTimeSample.xcodeproj by double-clicking it. From the Run menu select the Run item. Xcode will take a few seconds to build the sample and then it should launch. You'll be greeted by a standard Mac open dialog box. Navigate to a QuickTime movie on your hard drive and open it. You should see your movie begin playing back in the app's window. Hit the 'o' key to open a different movie file, or you can just drag & drop one from the Finder.
TinderBox is Cinder's GUI tool for creating new projects quickly and easily. A guide to creating projects using TinderBox is available here.
While not strictly necessary, if you would like to be able to step into Cinder's own code during your debug process, you'll want to build Cinder with debug symbols. This is straightforward - just open xcode/cinder.xcodeproj in XCode and build the Debug configuration for the Cinder target. If you are doing iOS development you'll want to do the same thing for the cinder_iphone and cinder_iphone_sim targets.