Thanks for your suggestions. This is why I'm not a big fan of Apple. I'm very surprised that they don't have a port of xCode that runs on PC so they can expand their development market. I'll take a look at Marmalade. Thanks again.

If I had to guess, it's because they've calculated that on a per-developer basis there is far more money to be made in selling Macs to a smaller number of developers than there is in selling one year of developer subscription, plus 30% cut of the zero dollars the vast majority of those non-mac developers would make selling their apps in the app store.

I second jbadams recommendation of MacInCloud if you really object to buying a Mac. But if you ever get really serious about developing mobile apps then you will eventually need to bite the bullet and just buy one. You can pick up a second hand Mac from ebay for relatively cheap and unlike a PC which would be obsolete after a few years, a 3 to 4 year old Mac is still adequate for developing apps. A friend recently picked up a 2011 Macbook pro which had a broken battery for only £200. He needs to keep it plugged in all the time but its still perfectly good for his needs ( his first app has already made him £1500 so it's money well spent).

Apple don't support development of iOS apps on PC for the same reason that Microsoft don't support windows 8 development on a Mac. They arn't forcefully preventing you from developing on a PC but, why should they develop tools that run on a competitors operating system.

Thanks everyone for your recommendations. I'll probably look at one of the suggested programs to start development on my PC. My whole issue is that I don't want to invest a bunch of money into something that I'm just playing around with and not serious about just yet. If I get some great idea and want to take it to the next step, I'll definitely pay the $99 developer fee and get a mac of some sort so I can publish. For right now, I don't want to spend several hundreds of dollars that I might not have time for.

I'll definitely look at the MacInCloud option and see how that works.

• You also use cocos2d-x (www.cocos2d-x.org) to develop your game on windows. After development, you can make build for iOS easily. PhoneGap is a good choice for you.
• In my old company - DeNA -. They have their own Game Engine: ngCore. you can see at developer.mobage.com
• Now, I'm developing my own cross platform GameEngine base on cocos2d-x. You can develop game by JavaScript language on Windows, iOS, Android. You will develop and launch your game as you connect to a webpage. I used V8 - a high speed javascript engine of Google - for my game engine: Jacos2d-x. It will be released soon as an opensource project.