Develop iPhone app without a Mac? [duplicate]

Answer 1

there's some special meta tags you can put in a webpage to make your web app savable and full screenable to the iphone hard drive. (so it can work offline) Here's an example : http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/125490362/glyphboard2

There's also frameworks like phonegap that let you access cocoa apis from javascript, but it sounds like you don't need that.

Answer 2

Does your wife enrolled in any kind of data plan? If so, you can simply write a small webapp which runs on some cheap webspace and access it via MobileSafari.

If you need a full grown iPhone application, you better look after one of the first intel-based mac minis on eBay, should be to expensive, in my opinion. And as a plus you avoid the hassle of a jailbreak.

Answer 3

You can jailbreak the phone and install Python. There are some sample applications in Cydia for it (it's called iPhone/Python. Search for Python in cydia).

Then you will have a "native" app, not a web application and you can use the entire iPhone UI library (the part of it that is accessible via py-objc anyway) and you don't need to run a web server in the background.

You can do your development on the phone itself via SSH or you can use an iPod Touch for it. Packaging is also easy (should you need it), just create your own Cydia repository and host your package(s) in there.

Look at iPhone applications in Python for more information.

Answer 4

Get someone else to do it, or rent the resources that you need.

Another option is to find nearby iPhone developer who has it all setup and either get him to write the app or do it together, he provides development environment you code the solution or code it together.

The only problem is that you wont be able to update maintain it.

I would still consider getting older gen Mac or Mac mini - all the other options sound more complicated.

Answer 5

If you are going to be stubborn about not using a mac, but you want an app that will work offline with the iPhone / iPod Touch and Android devices, then I would use HTML 5 to create an offline app.

You can do a lot now with HTML 5 - Google have an email client that uses HTML 5 for the iPhone now and it can work offline etc. If you do this and get the user to add a bookmark to their home screen for your app - it will be almost as good.

If I was you I'd fork out for a mac - or look to see if you could borrow one - or time-share with someone - you will not create a very good quality app without it.

Answer 6

Depends on what your time is worth, I guess. That seems like a terribly convoluted way to get what is otherwise a simple app on the phone to avoid the US$400 purchase of a used Mac Mini.

There is the hackintosh route, which may work on your existing hardware, but again one has to put a price on time. It's what got me started before I dropped big coin on a Macbook Pro, an MSI Wind then a home-built. It's of questionable legality (the right thing to do is fork over US$129 for Leopard regardless), but you are already talking about jailbreaking. :-)