is it possible to use Windows OS for iOS development?

[rcossio777]

Hi Team,

My name is Ralph Cossio and I am an inspiring game developer. I have a simple question that I wish you could answer soon. I am interested in your program and have heard only great things about it. I only have one question in regards to it which is important for me in regards to development purposes.

Can I work on a iOS project using a Windows CPU with their OS? Is there a way that I could modify, construct, develop iOS projects without an actual iOS device?

the purpose of this question is that at the moment, I do not own any sort of iOS product. I only have android and Windows. I will in the near future have an iOS device but I wanted to know if its possible with your development kit.

Thank you for your time,

Ralph Cossio
rcossio777@yahoo.com

[c6burns]

No. If there is a way other than running OS X in a virtual (or actual) environment then it would be news to me.

[Kojack]

There's ways.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2235 ... nt-machine
Not particularly nice ways though (installing OS X on your pc or in vmware), but they apparently work.
There was Winchain, but it looks like it hasn't been updated for a while.
A jailbroken iphone can apparently run the entire toolchain on itself (so the phone does the compiling), but I don't know how up to date that is.

The easiest way is to buy a Mac Mini (probably the cheapest apple desktop) and use that.

[c6burns]

Something like vmware/virtual box/etc was what I was hinting at by virtual environment. Not sure how that will work out trying to run the device emulator though or any serious desktop graphics development. I've never tried because it's slow/awkward. Hackintosh would be better if you can dual boot or have a spare machine for it. To me that sounds like a giant time suck compared to a mac mini which is 700$ new, but of course the money vs time tradeoff is in the eye of the beholder (or something like that).

[rcossio777]

Thanks everyone.

I figured that a virtual will be possible but what I am worried about is making the task of debugging, development and code management more complicated than needed. I also though of a possible plugin with OpenGL if it exist in which I create a virtual state machine that emulates an iOS. Now I am not sure if its available or even possible. I know that OpenGL functions similar or exactly like a state machine but I don't know if it could run a virtual presentation of iOS while using a Microsoft OS. I am new to Ogre3D and also with OpenGL. I will take all of your advice and invest in an affordable mac to operate these functions properly.

thanks again,

Ralph

[Kojack]

I could also suggest these options:
- Unity can do ios development on windows (but you still need a mac to do the deployment, so not much better)
- Android development works well on windows.
- Windows Phone development works really really well on windows.

But they don't answer the actual question.