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
That error is being triggered because you didn't weak-link the UIKit framework. The UIKit framework in iPhone OS 3.2 added the UISplitViewController, and if you link it in as normal your application will assume those symbols exist on 3.0, where they don't.
To weak-link a framework, find your application target in Xcode, inspect it, and go to the General tab. At the bottom of that tab should be a list of frameworks, with a column for Type. Change the Type for UIKit from Required to Weak and rebuild your application. That should take care of the runtime errors.
Your conditional logic is sound, but I tend to share an application delegate and do the interface-specific layout further down the line.
(Update: 12/21/2011) As of iOS 4.2, you should no longer need to weak link frameworks to prevent errors like this. As Marco Arment describes, if you build with iOS 4.2 or later and target down to iPhone OS 3.1+, individual classes are now weak linked and should have their +class
method return nil
if the class does not exist on the currently running version of the OS.
Best Answer
Well, you could just wrap every call to it in an if statement, like so:
But a better way (which might require restructuring your whole app, though) is to have separate view controllers for iPad and iPhone.
To get the scale of the device for a cross platform view or something, you could do like this:
To avoid typing this every time, you could declare a category on UIScreen, which uses this code inside a -realScale method or something.
All of these methods require setting the base SDK to 4.0 (so that you can access the 4.0 APIs) and the minimum iPhone deployment target to 3.2 (so it will run on iPad)