Iphone Dev on Linux, Windows

Question

I'm buying a mac in a month or so but could like to start working on an Iphone app before I actually get my mac. Is this possible on xp or ubuntu? I know that I won't be able to compile it or test it for the iphone to I get my mac but maybe I can get alot of my upfront work out of the way.

Answer 1

Don't think so. Maybe you could build a hackintosh.

Answer 2

If you're brave you can turn your PC into a hackintosh and dual-boot into Leopard. I did this for several months for iPhone development before getting a Mac.

Answer 3

I've heard from someone at our cocoaheads that they managed to find a VMWare image for OS X

Answer 4

Yes, you can use VMWare to run MacOS X. I'm not going to link to any sites but there are a number of downloads available for a hacked OSX image for VMWare.

Answer 5

You can do a Hackintosh but beware:

1. Apple can and does force iPhone devs to update to the latest OS to handle the latest iPhone SDK. Your hackintosh will lag official OS updates by several weeks or months, until Kalyway team (or whomever) gets it working and stable. So effectively you are locked into older firmware development when this happens.

2. Hackintoshes are notorious for suddenly not working, and not BOOTING at all because of some internal tweak you made when you installed something. Not yours of course, you are awesome and would of course keep a complete backup of your entire OS partition at all times to handle this. It's a PITA.

3. It takes some doing to install Mac OS X on commodity hardware. It's a pain in the ass and took me like 20 installs of the OS to get right. You of course are awesome and would do it much more quickly and with less headaches.

4. Hackintoshes (and PCs in general) are LOUD. Gamer-spec fans and so forth are loud, compared to my Mac Pro, which sits here silent as the grave. It's not that big a deal but it really got on my nerves how loud my machine was.

In short, you can do it, but it's hardly worth the effort. You do get a charge when you've got it booting into OS X the first time though, which is kind of neat. But for serious production use? Get a Mac Mini for 500 bucks and get to work. If you're like me your time is more valuable than the small amount you will pay for a real Mac.