Ios – Creating Thumbnail of a Image in iPhone

It's certainly possible to develop on a Windows machine, in fact, my first application was exclusively developed on the old Dell Precision I had at the time :)

There are three routes;

1. Install OSx86 (aka iATKOS / Kalyway) on a second partition/disk and dual boot.
2. Run Mac OS X Server under VMWare (Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) onwards, read the update below).
3. Use Delphi XE4 and the macincloud service. This is a commercial toolset, but the component and lib support is growing.

The first route requires modifying (or using a pre-modified) image of Leopard that can be installed on a regular PC. This is not as hard as you would think, although your success/effort ratio will depend upon how closely the hardware in your PC matches that in Mac hardware - e.g. if you're running a Core 2 Duo on an Intel Motherboard, with an NVidia graphics card you are laughing. If you're running an AMD machine or something without SSE3 it gets a little more involved.

If you purchase (or already own) a version of Leopard then this is a gray area since the Leopard EULA states you may only run it on an "Apple Labeled" machine. As many point out if you stick an Apple sticker on your PC you're probably covered.

The second option is more costly. The EULA for the workstation version of Leopard prevents it from being run under emulation and as a result, there's no support in VMWare for this. Leopard server, however, CAN be run under emulation and can be used for desktop purposes. Leopard server and VMWare are expensive, however.

If you're interested in option 1) I would suggest starting at Insanelymac and reading the OSx86 sections.

I do think you should consider whether the time you will invest is going to be worth the money you will save though. It was for me because I enjoy tinkering with this type of stuff and I started during the early iPhone betas, months before their App Store became available.

Alternatively, you could pick up a low-spec Mac Mini from eBay. You don't need much horsepower to run the SDK and you can always sell it on later if you decide to stop development or buy a better Mac.

Update: You cannot create a Mac OS X Client virtual machine for OS X 10.6 and earlier. Apple does not allow these Client OSes to be virtualized. With Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) onwards, Apple has changed its licensing agreement in regards to virtualization. Source: VMWare KnowledgeBase

Here's what I'm doing:

1) In my framework CMakeLists.txt file, I have the following:

IF (APPLE)
       SET_TARGET_PROPERTIES( MyFramework PROPERTIES FRAMEWORK true)
       SET_TARGET_PROPERTIES( MyFramework PROPERTIES
           XCODE_ATTRIBUTE_INSTALL_PATH @executable_path/../Frameworks/  )
ENDIF (APPLE)

The second "set_target_properties" line configures the framework to always be looked for in the application bundle in the Frameworks sub-folder.

2) In my top-level CMakeLists.txt file, I add setup a unified binary output directory:

SET (CMAKE_LIBRARY_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}/Bin)
SET (CMAKE_RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}/Bin )
SET (CMAKE_ARCHIVE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}/Bin )

3) Then, in my applications' CMakeLists.txt file, I have the following:

IF (APPLE)
       ADD_CUSTOM_COMMAND(
               TARGET MyApp
               POST_BUILD
               COMMAND ${PYTHON_EXECUTABLE}
               ARGS ${CMAKE_HOME_DIRECTORY}/CopyFramework.py
               --binary ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}/Bin
               --framework MyFramework.framework
               --app MyApp.app

    )
ENDIF (APPLE)

This calls out to my python script, which does the work of assembling the src and dest paths, and actually copying the Framework.

The final trick is that since this is a Mac only thing, I can rely on an Xcode environment variable within the Python script:

           config= os.environ["CONFIGURATION"]

This allows me to assemble the complete path to the actual binary locations of the framework and the app.

The one thing I wish was that there was a CMake variable that would expand to the current Config within the context of the ADD_CUSTOM_COMMAND... It'd be nice to not have to resort to using the Xcode environment variable.