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;
- Install OSx86 (aka iATKOS / Kalyway) on a second partition/disk and dual boot.
- Run Mac OS X Server under VMWare (Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) onwards, read the update below).
- 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
Aside from Open Signed Online, which is pretty hopeless when you want to debug on the device, the only options at the moment are to find someone with a publisher ID to create a developer certificate for you device via Open Signed Offline, or wait for Symbian to come up with another way to get you a developer certificate. They are already planning to make publisher IDs cheaper and easier for individuals to get (currently you need to be a registered company) and wider availability for developer certificates is also on the cards.
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I have never done any iPhone development, but I'd like to point out a few developments in the Symbian world which relate to some of your points:
It's certainly not to everyone's taste! For application development, Symbian C++ is going to become less and less relevant, as Qt (which is generally regarded as a very user friendly set of libraries) will be used for the next generation of the application framework / UI layers. The lower layers of the OS will continue to use the Symbian dialect of C++, but Qt libraries for functionality such as multimedia, location and messaging are being added - so app developers are unlikely to have to directly call native platform APIs.
Your description of the emulator (single host process, separate build target) is correct. Because of this, the emulator is essentially a port of the OS to a completely different platform (in this case x86), so does not model a phone closely at all. Happily, it is being phased out and replaced with a simulator, like those already included in the iPhone and Android SDKs. (In fact, the simulator is based on the same technology - QEMU - used by Android) Because the simulator translates ARM instructions into those understood by the desktop machine, the same binaries can be deployed to both the simulator and onto the device itself.
The simulator includes a "board model" consisting of a number of virtual peripherals, each of which maps part of the host machine - so for example the simulator audio device may be hooked up to the desktop sound card. Because this board model can be modified, the simulator environment can be tailored to very closely model a particular device, so expect to see device manufacturers ship a simulator in their SDK which closely resembles the corresponding physical device.
CodeWarrior is a pretty old and rather creaky IDE. Carbide (which is based on Eclipse) is better, and offers reasonably mature on-device debugging support (although not as slick at the XCode / iPhone solution). The IDE included in all Qt SDKs (Qt Creator) is probably the nicest, and has been compared to XCode in terms of usability.
Definitely true in the past. Hopefully getting better in future. Where there were once multiple UIs (S60, S80 and UIQ), there is now just one (currently S60-based; about to be replaced with a Qt-based UI).