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
To fix the OutOfMemory error, you should do something like this:
BitmapFactory.Options options = new BitmapFactory.Options();
options.inSampleSize = 8;
Bitmap preview_bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(is, null, options);
This inSampleSize
option reduces memory consumption.
Here's a complete method. First it reads image size without decoding the content itself. Then it finds the best inSampleSize
value, it should be a power of 2, and finally the image is decoded.
// Decodes image and scales it to reduce memory consumption
private Bitmap decodeFile(File f) {
try {
// Decode image size
BitmapFactory.Options o = new BitmapFactory.Options();
o.inJustDecodeBounds = true;
BitmapFactory.decodeStream(new FileInputStream(f), null, o);
// The new size we want to scale to
final int REQUIRED_SIZE=70;
// Find the correct scale value. It should be the power of 2.
int scale = 1;
while(o.outWidth / scale / 2 >= REQUIRED_SIZE &&
o.outHeight / scale / 2 >= REQUIRED_SIZE) {
scale *= 2;
}
// Decode with inSampleSize
BitmapFactory.Options o2 = new BitmapFactory.Options();
o2.inSampleSize = scale;
return BitmapFactory.decodeStream(new FileInputStream(f), null, o2);
} catch (FileNotFoundException e) {}
return null;
}
Best Answer
In my application I am both sending and receiving images through Xml. In order to facilitate this, I encode/decode the images using base64 encoding. MY encode/decode methods live in 2 objective-c categories, 1 for NSData and 1 for NSString. You call these methods on the respective data types, I have listed examples below. The methods are [NSData base64Encoding] and [NSString base64Decoding].
When sending to the server...
My "b64String" variable now has a base64 encoded string representation of my image. You can now wrap this in Xml and use your normal NSURLConnection to send it to the server.
When receiving from the sever... (Make sure you are sending base64 encoded text from the server)
You will do your normal Xml parsing, here my "value" variable holds the base64 string from the server.
You should be able to look up some common base64 encoding/decoding algorithms in Objective-C, let me know if you would like me to post my methods (they are kinda long so I obmitted them here).