Possible Duplicates: I'm looking to build an iPhone app for my wife's phone, but am not interested in buying a Mac as a development platform for a one-off piece of work. The app: • should run standalone on the iPhone (i.e. Without network connectivity) • would be perfectly acceptable with a GUI created using one of the iPhone Javascript libraries that are around • will do some database IO to read and update data • has no commercial value and will never be used by anyone else Here's my thinking: • jailbreak the iPhone • install Ruby + Sinatra on the iPhone • write the app using Sinatra, hitting a database (SQLite?) on the iPhone To access the app on the iPhone: • start the Sinatra app in the background (is this possible?) • start a Safari browser session • navigate to the Sinatra app at e.g.

This seems like a strange approach, but I can't think of a simpler way of writing a standalone iPhone app without buying a Mac. Is there a better way of doing this? Thanks Jeff, having read through many 'how do I hack the iPhone?' Questions, I don't regard my Q as a duplicate at all. I proposed an approach and asked if it was viable, which seems distinctly different from other requests I read.

Manually add a Mac. Automatic Mac provisioning. Build iOS apps from the Windows command-line. Building native iOS applications requires access to Apple's build tools, which only run on a Mac. The installation of these packages happens quickly and without a prompt.

For what it's worth, I'm going with an offline Web app solution (local database on the iPhone) which doesn't require me to buy a Mac and appears reasonably straightforward. Finally, I have both Python and Java running on the iPhone now, and can verify that building apps on an iPhone without a Mac is absolutely viable – Jul 8 '09 at 3:21 •. The only reliable info I could find is at the always-excellent MetaFilter The answer is apparently no. You absolutely need an Intel Mac of some description.

The entire iPhone build process is too deeply ingrained in XCode to build elsewhere; and the only other Objective-C compiler I know is gcc, which doesn't support any Apple's additions to the language (nor their libraries). And, in direct opposition to what people are saying above, Objective-C is absolutely my favorite native, compiled language. Elegant, small (only a few changes from C), late-binding, dynamic, straightforward. It's what C++ should have been. Lots of people recommend picking up a secondhand Intel (remember, must be Intel!) Mac Mini as the cheapest 'port of entry'. If you're considering creating a GUI using a javascript library anyway, why don't you just write a web app instead of an iPhone-native one? Scansnap ix500 driver for mac. It seems like overkill to jailbreak the device just so that you can install a ruby + sinatra web app on it.