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I have been learning objective C for about 3 weeks and I achived basic concepts but now I am trying to get hands on experience and since I dont own a mac Im trying realy hard with virtualization and have big problems (i succeeded only with snow leopard 10.5 which is version to old for xcode 3.2) nevermind, Im starting to wonder if other solution for iPhone development like phonegap, mobieOne are realy that bad? I know the native development is the best, but if you bulding application that use some menus and displays data from database is there sensible difference?

gorgi93
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    Seriously... how much is your time worth? Find a used Mac and take the path of least resistance. You're going to spend hours and hours and hours (sounds like might have already) trying to implement a non-standard solution. That's no way to learn. – mmc Jul 13 '12 at 17:08
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    possible duplicate of [How can I develop for iPhone using a Windows development machine?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22358/how-can-i-develop-for-iphone-using-a-windows-development-machine) – Paul R Jul 13 '12 at 17:09

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Consider trying RubyMotion. If you know Ruby of course. http://www.rubymotion.com/

Simon
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Here's a macbook on eBay for 300$. Im sure its not the greatest computer in the world, but you should absolutely be using objective c for an iphone app.

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Apple-Macbook-C2D-2-16-1-0-80-SnowLeopard-13-/160841255326?pt=Apple_Laptops&hash=item2572e2c99e#ht_1763wt_1163

Any time you lose in learning the language (which I agree was a bit of a long and frustrating process) you will gain back by using all of apple's documentation and the copious online tutorials. All the resources out there assume that you use Objective C.

I know its a slow process but invest in your future and do it the right way.

bkbeachlabs
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check these two:

Sencha Touch

Mono Touch

If you really wanna do serious iOS(could also be Mac OS X) development, you definitely wanna get a mac. You can use hackintosh on your pc, or download iso image of a modified Mac os x and run it on Virtual Machine (e.g: VMWare). However all you can find would be probably still limited. Last time when I looked on internet, I only found image file for snow leopard but soon Apple going to release mountain lion(which means the hacked Mac OS could be two generations behind).

You can use third party tools other than xcode to develop iOS apps. There are tons of them by using different languages such like C#, java, JavaScript,HTML5, but when they get complied and translated into a native iOS app, you will still need to have xcode running on a Mac.

Again, two things. First, I think you'd better have a mac, and if you don't, you need to find a way to get around it and you might not be able to catch the latest technologies(and that changes quite often in iOS!). Second, if you prefer to develop through a third party tool, it's depends on what languages you are most comfortable with. For C#, I recommend MonoTouch, and for JavaScript, I recommend SenchaTouch. You can find a lot of others.

Raymond Wang
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  • I checked the Mono Touch and it sounds perfect since I am a c# developer, but it is not free when you want to deploy project on the actual phone or am I wrong? also do you have personal experience with it? – gorgi93 Jul 13 '12 at 18:10
  • Yes it is only free to deploy to emulators. I never used it before but I heard it is good. There is even a published book you can find on amazon called Professional iPhone Programming with MonoTouch and .NET/C# – Raymond Wang Jul 13 '12 at 19:09
  • If you are looking for free ones, Sencha Touch is a good option. Their APIs are free, but if you wanna UI drag and drop IDE then you have to pay. One of the other alternatives is HTML5, and you can use PhoneGap. It is open source, totally free, and getting more and more popular these days. – Raymond Wang Jul 13 '12 at 19:11
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    Man I went through the exactly way before. I am a c# asp.net programmer, and it was just painful at the beginning of learning objective-c, however once you got use to it, it's all paid off. The platform and technologies are changing so fast and using third party development tools are always limited somehow. Seriously, i would go xcode if I were you, otherwise I'll totally do HTML5 since it is cross platforms and can be used to develop both native apps and web apps. – Raymond Wang Jul 13 '12 at 19:17