I have a great idea for an ipod touch game but don't have a mac. Is there a way to make an app without a Mac?
Mr. Ugly time: Your idea is worthless. You have no programming or art experience. You'll never get farther than buying a book or two. You could code it on a PC and compile or possibly even submit on hackintosh. But you'd never get that far.
How do you know he/she has no programming or art experience? --- As for developing without a mac how about this thread, yeah i know hard to find http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=89806
There are several ways of building iPhone games on PCs but I'm not up to date with the specifics. There are 2D engines but you could include Unity and Unreal. With the Unreal UDK I think you can even control your PC prototype with an iPhone/iPod/iPad via the UDK remote app. If you could use one of those engines to create a cool game, at that point you'd know it was worth investing in a used mac mini and a dev subscription. If you know a bit about C programming on the PC a great place to start would be the free SDK on the PowerVR developer site. I know of several major games that have been based on it. If you are looking for a way of getting an app to the app store without a mac, it might be possible but I suspect you have to pay for the service. Maybe someone else will know more.
Yeah, that's the kind of response usually reserved for someone looking for a coder willing to make their idea for a small percentage. I know hundreds of coders and very few have access to a mac. It's a totally fair question. I'd never have owned one if it wasn't for iPhone dev. Glad I did though.
Same. And I am still hoping to get away from it, Mac OS is so painfully slow and ugly, but iOS is nice.
Have lots of money. You either pay someone else to do it once, or buy a mac and be able to do it yourself whenever you want. There are ways around it, but money and difficulty wise, itd be wiser to save up for the Mac.
Airplay SDK, that's what I use. Applied for the free iOS licence from them, though I did still have to pay Apple $99/£59 to both test (on device) and submit the finished article...worth every penny without a doubt. The simulator is also ideal, and allows for remote control and video streaming. I code in pure C++, thus all PC experience (and OpenGL2) has been carried forward to iOS (etc). Also the SDK allows for extensions to be built with other SDK's (the one most people here use for example), then using the created extensions via the above. Also, conversion/porting to other mobile devices is all handled! I've not done so myself (neither have I used the extension side (EDK) as my app is as custom as I could get it)...but it's nice to know that there are no limits (for another very small fee). Nope, don't work there lol.
From this thread: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=79912. Seems like a rehash, doesn't it? Which is why I'm being harsh.
I'm a total convert, my only windows machines are now virtual ones running on VMWare. This really works if you have a lot of RAM and can dedicate 3 or 4 GB to it but, surprisingly for Apple, it's almost as cheap to put RAM in a mac as a desktop PC, as long as you don't actually buy it from them of course... My iMac now has 12GB on my macbook 8. With XCode4 I finally like XCode more than Visual Studio and for almost all of my other needs (photoshop, web browsers, chat clients) the mac beats the PC hands down. That said, I know a lot of iPhone developers who barely touch the mac and I do slightly resent the fact that all of my macs cost at least 25% more than a similarly specced PC. Gotta love the macbook battery life and all of that shiny alumin(i)um and glass though.
I don't mind the premium so much. The Apple Genius support is incredible (once they replaced a $750 logic board from a 6 year-old iBook free of charge; another time replaced the hinges on my MacBook Air, also free of charge) and in 8 years with Macs, those are the only defects I've encountered. Whenever I'm using Windows PCs, the component failure rate increases by a factor of at least five, and I never get any sort of any decent manufacturer support on the PC side. That 25% premium probably ends up saving me much more in the long run.
Huh. Okay, I see where you're coming from K?!. It still seems a wee bit harshly worded, but I was indeed missing something. Good idea to try to nip it in the bud.
It was worded that way as Mr. Ugly generally pulls no punches and makes me feel bad for even having read a question. Go to the "looking for work" forum and find someone to make it
Probably had luck. My Mac Mini was on, I was two hours away, it was off. And I was not able to boot anymore. I called Apple, they said: Pay us 50 now or we wont tell you anything. Not quite the support you want. And the same happened with my iPod Touch. Just stopped working. And all my other hardware never failed me. I have a 13-year old Subnutebook (tinier than Air) still running Gentoo Linux with no problems. But at my publisher they have tons of failing Mac Hardware. The scrap 5 failed Macs and build a working one... It seems Apple is investing too much in useless design and to less in inner hardware (we still are nowhere in the Windows/GNU/Linux power range for the same money, but I still expect the hardware to be working reliable).
I thought it was you schtick, the ugly truth so to speak. Unless of course you're actually just ugly, in which case, I'm sorry.
Hmm... that definitely sucks. Your experience seems to goes against the general trend though... (PC World 2010 user survey) I think you've just had bad luck. One more thing, Apple's phone support generally isn't free after your AppleCare period is over. Take it to an Apple Store and you won't have a problem though.
Would be a bit too much bad luck and friends I know had same problems (unworking iPods, still not working after reperature or failing fast again). I am used to free (or only telephone cost) customer service, I could call Dell, Asus, Acer and they were helping me for free, even if the product was older than 2 years.