I was following this tutorial and stumbled across this screen shot:
apparently there was a way to make the Xcode project file relative to some user defined env variable in earlier versions of Xcode (you get there by highlighting the project file then clicking cmd+i)
I couldn't find a way to this in Xcode 4.5 (the closest I could get to that was this post, but the instructions don't work on Xcode 4.5)
ideas?
update: I tried the idea of changing the 'header search paths' under build settings.. and setting 'always search user paths' to 'yes' as suggested here.. but then my project always builds successfully if I try that even if I put a non-existent path in that field.