So, I got interested in developing an application for the iPhone, but I don’t have a decent Mac to develop on. I found that the iPhone development is based on a subset of the Mac Cocoa framework. OSX came from NeXTStep. Cocoa is mostly NeXTStep libraries… hummm… how can I learn Objective-C/Cocoa on a PC… let me think…

  1. Download and install GNUStep System and Core for windows.
  2. Learn & write some objective-c code using some of the NS libraries
  3. Compile using gcc (comes with GNUStep). I use ant, my build file is attached - fiddle with it to work in your environment
  4. You may also have to have CygWin installed. I’m not actually sure which pieces are making this all work yet, so give that a try (install the base package, plus gcc, gdb, and whatever else you like)

Currently, I’ve got this all working, and I’m using the Foundation library in the attached example. Going to try getting some UI stuff to work next.

I love open source… hehe.

p.s. this was also a handy site