iOS development with Elements on Windows

Elements Oxygene
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I have zero iOS experience. I’m not even entirely certain I want to do iPhone app development. But, I thought I might try playing with it. But, if it is too much trouble, I probably won’t, LOL.

I do happen to have Delphi Professional, and Embaradero just started to give their mobil package for free. And I could play with that maybe. Though I know you guys at RemObjects aren’t impressed with their approach of Firemonkey. No idea if I would need a Mac if I used Firemonkey.

And I know Visual Studio has some iOS support, but don’t know much about it either. Or if it needs a Mac.

As you might guess, I know next to nothing about XCode, Cocoa, Swift. I kinda know what they are, but that is it.

I do know that you have needed to have a Mac for at least part of the development process, though there are services like Macincloud. Though perhaps some of these newer technologies like what Delphi does or what Visual Studio does might make having a Mac no longer necessary?

So, basically I have Delphi Professional. I have Visual Studio 2017. I have an iPhone. I don’t have Elements, but I am open to giving it a try. I know Delphi reasonably well. I know C# somewhat, not as well as Delphi. Never used Swift or any Mac technology.

Given what I got and what I know, what is the easiest way to get feet wet doing iPhone develpment? I expect it will mainly be just a hobby at most.

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No response? No points on the easist way to get feet wet doing iPhone development?

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I think all solutions require a mac for the final build and sign so that you can upload to the app store.

I started a while back by buying a mac mini. Being a .net developer I was initially attracted to an early version of the xamarin environment but lost interest when I had difficulty using it and finding developer resources like examples and documentation.

I then switched over to using Oxygene with Visual Studio in a VM and I moved to Fire when that was released.

I greatly prefer Oxygene because of the language. You still use the native tools for UI development/profiling and can consume 3rd party frameworks/static libraries, so documentation and samples are applicable.

One thing I recall as being interesting at the time I started was that Oxygene had been enhanced to support multi part method names

https://docs.elementscompiler.com/Oxygene/Members/Methods/

so it makes it a lot easier when your looking at the platform documentation and writing code.

Cheers,
John