I have been using XCode for IPhone development since start. Out of curiosity, are there other IDEs available for IPhone development. If so, in what way are they better than XCode (if they are). Kindly help me learning with that IDE if there is any.
Thanks
There are no realistic alternatives to XCode for development using Cocoa or Cocoa Touch; i.e. applications targeting Mac OS X or iOS.
You can try using tools provided by Adobe.
Check this Link http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/abansod_iphone.html
But as Williham said XCode is the best way there is.
My project manager used Mac's TextEdit to code a robust game, game framework and some libraries from scratch. The advantages of TextEdit: Load faster than xcode.
There is AppCode by Jetbrains. Still in development, though.
Not really for me - but if you're a user of their other IDEs, then you might find it more comfortable than Xcode.
Related
I know that you need a Mac and Xcode and the SDK. But is it possible to develop apps for jaibroken devices and/or regular devices using Windows/Linux platforms ?
Edit
Also, what's the lowdown on the Airplay SDK ? Heard that it's pretty good but doesnt offer the same performance as an app developed through Xcode.
Found this PDF Document, for what it's
Actually you can, and that's what programming is all about. If you're a tough programmer you can do lots of cross platform and cross hardware stuff. Don't forget that no matter how cool Steeve Jobs is (or pretends to be) for Apple and maybe even non-Apple consumers they care about their profit and would never declare officially that building apps for iPhone and other iOS devices is possible on PC too. This way they make you get a Mac. They've been very successful in making people believe that building apps for iPhone is not possible otherwise.
There's a toolchain for Linux platforms, but it doesn't have Interface Builder or other niceties. Here's an example application that uses it.
You may be looking for theos. Have a look at this thread.
Of course, you will have to have your toolchain installed, which shouldn't be that hard. There are a lot of projects which involve having a Linux iOS toolchain. Windows is another story, though :P (not saying it's impossible!).
Short answer is no - fundamentally iPhone OS uses Cocoa, which is a closed framework only distributed with XCode. Some people have thought about reverse engineering (like Wine) but I don't think anybody has really been successful thus far, let alone use Cocoa as a development environment.
You might be able to create some debian packages (dpkg) that can be run in the background or via the mobile terminal. This is kind of limiting though, because you don't have access to GUI and your app won't be very intuitive.
There seems to be a development platform for porting Blender game logic into a full-fledged iphone game. Maybe you could avoid Xcode this way, but I doubt it.
http://sio2interactive.com/
You could run OSX within Virtualbox/VMWare Player but that's not allowed by Apple.
Don't listen to other people who insist that you HAVE to get a Mac. You just need to download a copy of cracked VMWare with pre-installed Mac from http://thepiratebay.org/. You also need to download a copy of cracked VMWare player from the same site. Then download Xcode inside the Mac. No need to pay for anything. I've been using it and working great.
Short answer -- YES.
Although i'm not entirely sure what you mean by "ONLY" for jailbroken devices, but if you have any experience at all with flash scripts or action scripts then check out Adobe Flash Professional CS5.5. It's a program that lets you design and write your own apps for ipod/iphone/ipad.
http://www.adobe.com/products/flash.html
I've used it for years and find it perfect.
I'm interested in making apps for the iphone. I was wondering if it were possible to make apps, WITHOUT Xcode. the only reason is because I'm dirt poor, and can't afford an Apple.
If it's games you're interested in developing, then another option might be to take a look at Unity (http://unity3d.com/). This would let you develop on the PC for free in a friendly environment for a beginner. If you then develop something that you decide you want to publish on iPhone, then at that point you could invest in a Mac and just rebuild the Unity app for iPhone on that.
Also, Unity lets you write scripts in both C# and Java so you wouldn't have to learn Obj-C.
The short answer is no. The long answer is "not exactly," but you can get started in some ways while you're working on getting access to a Mac you can do the work you'd like to do on.
"XCode" is more or less really two things:
(1) an IDE
(2) a toolchain with a C/ObjC/C++ compiler (really a version of gcc) and a big library of apps
You don't have to use #1 in order to build iPhone Apps, though it's genuinely helpful. You can get by with #2.
But without #2, you're going to have a hard time building an App you can sell in the App store.
So, it depends on what your goal is.
If it really is to build an app and get it out there, the easiest path is probably going to be to find some way to get access to a machine running OS (probably 10.5 and up) you can do development on. That might be talking a friend who has one into letting you spend some scheduled time on it, or it might be working and saving up for a used intel-based Mac mini (probably something you could get for $300), or it might be turning a PC you've got into a Hackintosh (or maybe setting up a Hackintosh VM on the PC if you're sharing it with others who might not want it transformed thusly :).
If your goal is to start learning how to do things while you work out how you're going to do the above, though, the good news is that it's not hard to get a hold of tools that will help you learn the technologies/languages involved in iPhone apps. Like I said earlier, Apple's compiler is really just a version of gcc. You can probably install gcc on your machine and write objective C programs with it. You could also look into GNUStep which could help you get familiar with a lot of the concepts and practices underlying how the Cocoa libraries work for the iPhone and OS X. And you could learn OpenGL ES, which would be great help if you ever end up working on an iPhone game.
Actually You can develop apps without a Mac. You can use a number of languages and tools that enable writing apps for iOS like:
- Python
- PhoneGap
- Appcelerator
- Mono
- Unity3D
- Unreal Engine
These all can export to iOS.
The only step that requires a Mac is publishing to the app store. But You can use any Mac for that, so You can publish from a friend's/neighbour's or actually anyone's Mac. That is the last step when You're sure everything is running perfectly. Perhaps Your application will earn You Your own Mac.
Also there are a number of publishing service providers in the internet (which don't cost nearly as much as a Mac). I don't remember any particular one at the moment, but I'm sure if You search You will find many. Good luck!
Unfortunately, although there are 'alternatives' (phonegap, mono touch, etc.) I believe you ultimately need Xcode and its tools to package/sign/publish your applications.
If you are really motivated though, you can look about ways of installing Mac OS X on a PC, though that is beyond the scope of this website.
In short, you need a mac. There a number of screwed up ways to do this without a mac, but for all intents and purposes you need a mac. A mac mini you can buy used for $300 on ebay will do the trick. You don't need a powerful machine.
Though Xcode itself is free it does require an Intel based Mac running Snow Leopard. You have 2 options:
Buy a refurbished Mac Pro or Mac mini from Apple website. They are not that expensive. You can use non-Apple peripherals with them to bring down the cost. And you will not be disappointed with quality.
Use Hackintosh to run the OS X on other Intel platform. Its hacky, difficult (carshes) and illegal.
Update:
For Objective C you can refer a pretty good documentation of Objective C language at iPhone developer portal. There are many other documents like memory management and human interface guidelines which should help you get started.
Once you have developed the familiarity with Objective C, you can then browse through various programming guides on iPhone development centre. If you want to follow a systematic approach, you may refer to "Beginning iPhone Development" book which I found pretty good.
Yes it's possible to develop applications for the mac/ipad/iphone without Xcode and without a mac/ipad/iphone.I own a imac,an ipad,and and a mac book pro.I tried to develop in xcode.
After some quick search on the internet I found this http://www.gnustep.org/. This is a framework you can use to develop in the objective C language,using GCC (the GNU compiler).There are other tools you can use,like GNU STEP Application project:this seems to be a sort of IDE (I didn't test it yet).
Yes and no. You can use alternative SDK's but they can be a pain to use and don't offer the publish/signing capabilities that Xcode does.
Is it possible to develop iPhone applications on Mac without Xcode?
You need to at least install Xcode (or more specifically the Apple Developer Tools package, which includes Xcode and various other tools etc). You can then use the underlying tools directly without actually going via the Xcode IDE, but that would be a perverse thing to do.
Yes, it is possible, Xcode is just an IDE around command-line tools such as make, gcc and others. But Xcode makes a lot of things easy for you, building your own development environment would be a lot of work. If you just want to use a different editor, you might want to check out man xcodebuild.
It's possible to not use Xcode, but trying to develop iPhone apps without it would make your life so much harder I'd strongly encourage you to use it. You'll have to install the dev tools that includes it anyway, and it's mandatory for deploying the app on the iPhone to test it so you may as well get using it now.
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Starting iPhone app development in Linux?
Is there a way to use Ubuntu Linux for developing iPhone applications destined to be listed on Apples app store ?
Many of the other solutions will work, but they all make use of the open-toolchain for the iPhone SDK. So, yes, you can write software for the iPhone on other platforms... BUT...
Since you specify that you want your app to end up on the App Store, then, no, there's not really any way to do this. There's certainly no time effective way to do this. Even if you only value your own time at $20/hr, it will be far more efficient to buy a used intel Mac, and download the free SDK.
Not officially, no. It's just Objective-C though and the compiler's open source - you could probably get the headers and compile it and somehow get the binary on the device. Another option is compiling on the device. All these options will require jailbreaking though.
A Mac Mini is just $599...
There are two things I think you could try to develop iPhone applications.
You can try the Aptana mobile wep app plugin for eclipse which is nice, although still in early stage. It comes with a emulator for running the applications so this could be helpful
You can try cocoa
(Extra) Here is a nice guide I found of guy who managed to get the iPhone SDK running in ubuntu, hope this help -_-. iPhone on Ubuntu
I found one interesting site which seems pretty detailed on how you could setup a ubuntu for iPhone development. But it's a little old from November 2008 for the SDK 2.0.
Ubuntu 8.10 for iPhone open toolchain SDK2.0
The instructions also include something about the Android SDK/Emulator which you can leave out.
With some tweaking and lots of sweat, it's probably possible to get gcc to compile your Obj-C source on Ubuntu to a binary form that will be compatible with an iPhone ARM processor. But that can't really be considered "iPhone Application development" because you won't have access to all the proprietary APIs of the iPhone (all the Cocoa stuff).
Another real problem is you need to sign your apps so that they can be made available to the app store. I know of no other tool than XCode to achieve that.
Also, you won't be able to test your code, as they is no open source iPhone simulator... maybe you might pull something off with qemu, but again, lots of effort ahead for a small result.
So you might as well buy a used mac or a Mac mini as it has been mentioned previously, you'll save yourself a lot of effort.
Probably not. While I can't log into the Apple Development site, according to this post you need an intel mac platform.
http://tinleyharrier.blogspot.com/2008/03/iphone-sdk-requirements.html
It can be done!!!!!!
There is someone who did it.
Enjoy :)
There are several way to do it, may decide to go the native way by downloading a VM application for linux and the install Mac OS in your VM and then download the Xcode application for mac But the true is i tried this path but it was really long so i decide to get sencha touch and phonegap for mobile phone,here the sencha-touch is a javascript framework that will help you in developing the interfaces and the phonegap is also javascript library which will help to access the feature of your Iphone or any oher mobile platform
I'm using sencha-touch and phonegap ,its really work for me
Perhaps the best way would be to implement your app as a web app. I think you can also make web apps that run direct on the phone, without internet access or a remote server.
Web app, sounds lame? But a lot can be done with DHTML / HTML5 / JavaScript. It's a rare app that requires more power and couldn't be done as a web app. And you get pretty good cross platform with Web / JavaScript - the browsers vary a bit but a good web dev can write one web app that works pretty much everywhere.
Of course if you're writing a high-performance 3D game, the browser might not deliver what you need! maybe in a few years... Apparently some Google hackers ported Quake 2 to HTML5 already!
http://web.appstorm.net/roundups/browsers/10-html5-games-paving-the-way/
Although I've been getting more and more familiar with Xcode while developing for the iPhone, there are times I just wished I had a better IDE, something like Eclipse.
So I was wondering does anyone know how to migrate iPhone projects to Eclipse, and if it's worth it?
XCode largely uses standard Unix tools for a lot of its work. iPhone applications are compiled using GCC 4.0, it uses gdb for debugging, so it should be possible to set up Eclipse to at least compile applications.
If you look in the Build section of the Project Info pane (select the project, hit the Info button in XCode, choose the Build tab from the top) you can see many of the options.
I'm not sure what is required to copy a file to the simulator and attach a debugger to do a test run, it might not be worthwhile to jump through all the hoops and Apple may require an XCode generated build to accept an app into the App Store.
It may be the case that for regular code editing you can work reasonably well in Eclipse, then switch to XCode for interactive debugging.
Most of the existing Eclipse plugins seem to be oriented towards developer iPhone-aware web applications, so I'm not sure if you'll get any help there.
As far as I know you cant use Eclipse or any other IDE to develop for iPhone.
Apple only supports XCode and this wont change in the future. So I think you have to get used to XCode.
Late in the game, but you might want to kick the tires with JetBrains's AppCode, eventually a full feature drop-in replacement for xCode ... and very similar to IntelliJ (GUI, work flows, etc...). Still Early Adopter as of now, it performs some tasks rather well. I still use xCode for configuring the build options and targeting the device, but that will eventually be taken care of.
regards
There's cross compiling that give you ability to develop IPhone apps on eclipse
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG-NIt2O5J8
There are no plugins that support Apple IOS application development in Eclipse but on windows, you can develop using Adobe CS5. This is one of the powerful tool from Adobe in which you can develop .ipa applications on windows but you need some stuff to be ready before you start developing IOS applications using Adobe CS5