HN Explorer

Ask HN: Developing iOS apps in windows

3 points by _ud4a ↗ HN
so i figured i'd jump on the iPad and iOS development train and start developing some apps i had in mind. i registered for the "iOS developer program" on the apple website and after realized that their SDK runs only on MAC which i don't have! anyway around this or do i have to bite the bullet and buy a mac!?

6 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 25.0 ms ] thread
subv3rsion
You are going to have to bite the bullet and buy a mac to do real iOS dev. Alternatively? You could try and use something like Phonegap or Titanium. See http://phonegap.com/. Not XCode or Obj-C, but if you have some good HTML5 or Javascript chops it is a step in a good direction.
_ud4a
that's what i was afraid of! i guess it makes sense from their perspective since Microsoft doesn't let non windows boxes run Visual Studio!

thanks for the reply. the wife needs a new laptop so i guess she'll get a Mac!

subv3rsion
Good luck. Should be some good deals with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Side note when you do dive into iOS, grab Aaron Hillegass' Obj-C book and his iOS book.
kls
Th legal grey area answer is to buy a Retail Mac OSX install and then install a virtual hackintosh in one of the visualization packages available for windows. Hackintosh as it is known, is a series of patches and configurations to OSX to get it to run on non Apple hardware. There has been a lot of debate about it as Apple claims that OSX should only be legally run on Apple hardware while others like the EFF argue that if a person buys the OS they should be free to chose how they run it. It is a grey area and I don't know if any legal challenges have been made on the subject. I do know that their was a company making Hackintosh computers that Apple sued but they got them on a technicality on how they where installing the OS IIRC.
srid68
You can also use mono touch (xamarin product) to develop iOS apps using c#. you still will require Mac
kingofspain
You can run OS X in a VM. I originally had mine setup in VMware but virtual box works too. I've built a couple of apps with that setup so it's certainly possible. No doubt the experience is better on a real Mac but it works.