Yesterday I started down the path of discovering what it takes to develop application for the IPad (and I suppose the IPhone and MacOS in general).  Step one was to register as an Apple Developer (http://developer.apple.com/programs/register/).  That was quick, painless, and free.

Today I went and looked for the Apple Software Development Kit (SDK).  Its free, and is designed to run under Mac OS (of course!).  So… how to proceed?  Would I need to buy a Mac to explore this?  Not an option right now.  A bit of we browsing has revealed a lot on how to create a “hackintosh” – a normal PC running Mac OS natively.  This was made technically possible when MacOS converted to running on the Intel platform a number of years ago.  One needs either a new PC machine (cheaper than a Mac equivalent) or a partition on an existing Windows box.  Fortunately, my Windows 7 machine has several hundred GBs free on its disk, so I just used the Windows disk management (control panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management) to shrink the partition freeing up space for a Mac OS partition.  The hackintosh page indicates I need a Mac OS thumb-drive to boot from.  This can be created by downloading the Mac OS DVD image ($29 from the Mac Store) and placing on your own USB thumb drive, or buy buying the OS pre-installed on a thumb drive from the Mac store ($69).  Given that a 16GB thumb drive cost at least half the difference, and requires some effort to format and move the DVD image over, I opted to order the pre-installed device.  That should be here next week.

I was wondering if I could run it in a VM under Windows and found this link:

http://techexxpert.blogspot.com/2011/08/how-to-virtualize-os-x-lion-on-windows.html

Apparently one can.  Seems to me like the legalities are questionable, but I’ll probably explore this while waiting for my thumb drive.  Note the above link is based on VMWare Workstation, which is free for 30 days, but cost $189 to purchase.

More as I progress!

9/1/2011:  Quick update.  I ordered the MAC OS thumb drive from the Apple store at 11:23am yesterday.  Standard delivery.   Order was shipped UPS at 4:46pm.  Delivered today at noon.  Pretty darn impressive!