E-Book and digital comic developers that made apps for iOS normally had to buy a MAC in order to write and test their code. Microsoft has just announced a new initiative that allows you to do it all with a PC with the new Xamarin Live Player, you can deploy, run, test and debug iOS apps directly from a Windows PC that runs Visual Studio.
Microsoft has secured Apple’s blessing and is marketing Windows 10 as a cross platform operating system, but developers are expressing some trepidation. Nobody is writing Objective-C or Swift mobile apps on Windows, most people are using Xcode.
The final build and submission to the App Store will still require a Mac, so you can’t go without an Apple system entirely, but what this means is that if you want to develop, as many of us do, on a laptop and aren’t on the same network as your Mac, you can.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
