I was talking with a buddy the other day and he mentioned wanting to develop iOS and Mac apps with Xojo but didn’t want to invest in a Mac. So we looked around and found a few places that will rent you a Mac completely in the cloud hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly for very reasonable prices. Using these services, you can develop (and sign, etc) any kind of app for Mac or iOS without the costs of buying a Mac.
He settled on this one:
https://www.macincloud.com/
Thoughts?
Wouldn’t a VM in the cloud like that put you Developer Credientials at risk? Not to mention the intellectual property of the application itself.
I suppose it could be an issue but that can be reasonably managed through proper security protocol. Also, if someone isn’t comfortable with their IP being in the cloud, they could move it back and forth to their local machine before and after working on it. But, really, Macs don’t have a huge history of security vulnerabilities so I’d assume this wouldn’t be a huge risk or problem.
Still, I’d not recommend this for a major app developer. But for someone who’s just dipping their toes into the water and playing around with it, it beats spending the money on a Mac just to find out your app won’t make any money after all.
Macs (physical) and Macs (cloud) I do not put in the same comfort zone, but then that is just me 
I think XOJO Win should be allowed to CREATE an iOS app… but not RUN it (ie… testing would require a MAC), but editting should not
Wow… Now renting connections to my computer!
I’ll give you your own user account, and the harddrive is FileVault encrypted so your files aren’t at risk!
[quote=152956:@Dave S]
I think XOJO Win should be allowed to CREATE an iOS app… but not RUN it (ie… testing would require a MAC), but editting should not[/quote]
Best you could do is edit the project
Nothing more - yet
We do have ideas though
Two ways:
You could do with a cloud simulator for windows. Edit on your windows machine simulate on the cloud
I would just tell your friend to buy a Mac, 'cause…
I run Mac on Virtualbox… but developing IOS could be really painful and slow, for me I was doing cross platform so I could do the main development on Windows and only use Mac to test and fix if need be
I tried IOS with another IDE and by time the emulator fired up it pretty much wiped out all the ram, XCode ran really badly too
if you just want to try, use virtualbox if your serious buy a Mac
Even with a legit Mac DVD its still a bit hacky, you can’t up date and you need boot disks to install it, the keyboard layout differs, graphic cards are emulated
I have a i7 3770k 8 meg of ram maybe something faster would be better, but I found it ran Virtual box better at the recommended amounts which would be a dual core with 2gb of ram
Like said if I was doing IOS I’d find a second hand Mac that reaches the requirements, its just not worth the frustration
@ Jason no sorry I’d be one of those “why isn’t there a Mac version!” people and regret the choice quite quickly
Yes I thought that too - for 25 years. I owned a successful medium sized software business making money exclusively with subscription Windows apps and shunned everything Apple passionately. But my passion was uninformed. When I sold that company three years ago I just thought I’d try a Mac while sitting at home on the couch. I discovered that there isn’t a single Windows app that I need and, even though you can get apps such as the MS Office apps in a Mac version, I find that the Apple equivalents are more than enough. Most of the world is now using browser-based apps or mobile device apps anyway and all of these are at least exactly the same on a Mac, if not better. The only non-browser-based apps of any significance tend to be high-end apps of which the Mac versions are almost always better. Since then I’ve started two more businesses exclusively on the Apple ecosystem with some Google Apps stuff thrown in and quite a few third-party cloud solutions and it’s just brilliant. I couldn’t go back to Windows. But, like everything, YMMV. 
Most of my hobby revolves around 3D, modelling, rendering etc so it’s mainly cost/hardware, upgradability, software wise I think my tool chain is covered these days on Mac
millions of people can’t be wrong, so I’d never knock Mac, I actually do like it and Linux, just Mac on VB isn’t ideal
Playing with Xojo I had less hassle with my Mac project than the Windows one lol
[quote=152943:@Anthony Papillion]He settled on this one:
https://www.macincloud.com/
Thoughts?[/quote]
This is fascinating. I had no idea there were services like this. I still think if you’re serious, a Mac mini (or used Mac) would make more sense. But a service like this might be a good way to “kick the tires”, so to speak. I’ll have to try it out.
[quote=153038:@Christoph De Vocht]Two ways: