I was wondering if I could make some money by creating an iDevice app and posting it on the Rock your Phone Store. Which language should I use and are there exceptions to it.
+1
A:
I tried that a few weeks back. There's a project called GnuStep that includes a runtime library for Objective C. However, I was a bit disappointed to find that there are big differences to the Cocoa library provided by (and only on) Apple. A lot of the classes and methods I found in Apple's Cocoa documentation were not supported, so programming became a bit tedious. There are even differences in the dialect of Objective-C that's available. I ended up developing on my MacBook using XCode.
If you're willing to put up with the limits and inconvenience of not developing in the "genuine" environment, it is possible. I think I heard that some people do it.
You should be able to get a used MacMini for something like $200... that would allow you do iSomething development in a "real" native Mac environment. The version of XCode required to produce apps for iMac and iPad requires OS X.6 .
Alternatively, I hear there are projects that allow one to run Mac OS X on non-Mac hardware. However, this is illegal because it's in breach of your (or anyone's) contract with Apple. Creating Apple programs in an illegally set-up environment is probably not a promising start to a flourishing business relationship with the only distributor for your software.
Carl Smotricz
2010-07-15 13:11:50