I've been looking in to Iphone coding, but after learning the basics I went to download the SDK, apparently its only for Mac, I wanted to know if there was something I could use to build apps off of a windows PC
If you somehow manage to install Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6 on your PC (you could use a Virtual PC software... There are some good free out there... So you only need the Mac OS X ), you won't need a Mac. Otherwise you can only build Web-Apps, so no "real" Apps one downloads from the AppStore...
Flickitty didn't use the iPhone SDK apple provided, he used some other language, which is why it was possible.
Flickitty is really difficult to explain. The vast majority of the game is coded in Lua (scripting language). Lua is extremely easy to work with, it is lightning fast (look at the framerate in Flickitty) and the footprint is extremely small. Essentially it is the perfect language for mobile devices. Lua is also used in hundreds of desktop games, including World of Warcraft. Now of course a scripting language is useless without an interpreter. So I have a custom-built engine for that. I guess you could say it is like building a game in Flash, except execution is much faster. There are other (iPhone) engines that use Lua, with best option being sio2, except it is mainly 3D. Corona also uses Lua, but it is a complete turd and basically used for Apps (not games). So my custom engine is about 99% C/C++, which makes it run on Windows. I used the Windows build to build Flickitty. However, we still needed a Mac to build the Distribution and Release builds. So somewhere down the line, you DO need a Mac. In our case, we need it for about 30 minutes to compile the necessary builds. Since the engine is mainly C/C++ that makes it easy to port to nearly any platform. We can currently run it on Windows, MacOs, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Linux with very little modification. That is way more info than anyone actually needed.
Impressive... so you basically used the language which is used to build small interface customizations in World of Warcraft? I knew I would regret not learning this language someday
I guess i need money Thanx everyone for at least shedding some info including You Flickitty But Alas i still need a mac i would love to develop apps on windows though...... I guess selling my xbox 360 will get me the money! Hahahhaha
It was mentioned *cough* earlier that this sort of thread has *cough* been around ... but I'll add additional info ... which has already been discussed. There are a few devs out there that are doing development on a PC. We're one of them as well. But you will eventually need a Mac in the pipeline at the end. Most people doing this will probably be using OpenGL and C++ as their core code base. They would then have a small amount of intermediary code to interface to the iPhone (eg. creating GL contexts). And of course, on the PC, you may possibly be using OpenGL instead of OpenGL ES (our engine supports both). You can also use OpenAL on the PC as well as the Mac. Even though we actually use AudioQueues, our first audio engine used OpenAL. Note that Obj-C will allow you to mix in C++ if you want. You just need to make sure in xCode to tag the files as sourcecode.cpp.objcpp. You only need this for files that mix the two. At the end of the day, you will need to cross compile for your target, which is the iPhone to get in on the device for both testing and distribution. We only use the Mac for difficult debug situations that occur on the device, testing, and doing distribution and release builds. However, if we had to, we could go all Mac, because everything, include our tool chain has been ported to the Mac. So whether or not you use a PC or not I think largely depends on preference. My guess is most devs working on the PC now have probably already built for the PC, so they know the Visual Studio and other tools on the PC well.
i tried the virtual machine thing, and dual booting... apparently my pc can only run os x 7 or 8 Sorry, I'm new to the forums, next time I'll do a search or two and thanks for the link i'm gonna read that later.... I didn't know apple alowed that, thought it was only xcode for the ipod.... I'm gonna try that now that i've found out my pc's more of a piece of junk than i thought
haha no problem, it was just funny because it was still on the first page of posts, you didn't even need to use search
thats me alright, i thought i read through the first 2 pages though.... hmmmmm thats pretty bad on my part.....