What is winChain Builder?
What it is: It's the easiest possible way to build the iPhone toolchain on a Windows XP/Vista computer. It's a GUI installer for the toolchain which can completely install the whole thing in minutes, as opposed to sitting in front of a bunch of DOS windows trying to build thousands of source code files with confusing UNIX commands.
What it isn't: It's not a magical iPhone IDE or Interface Builder or anything like that. For that kind of stuff, you'll have to wait a little longer...
What is the iPhone Toolchain?
The iPhone toolchain is the bunch of programs the Dev Team and their various accomplices have put together, which can take Objective-C source code that you write using their UIKit Headers (included with winChain) and compile it into an application that you can use on your iPhone.
How Does winChain Work?
- Download winChain from the Downloads section, and then the preBuiltToolchain file here.
- Download WinRAR from http://www.rarlabs.com and use it to extract the preBuiltToolchain. Be sure to right-click the RAR and choose "Extract Here" not "Extract to preBuiltToolchain" or any of the other options!
- Launch winChain.exe and browse to your preBuiltToolchain folder.
- Hit the first button to copy over the files.
- Hit the second button to install Cygwin.
- Hit the third button if you want to install Notepad++ for code-writing.
And you're done!
How Do I Make Projects?
winChain also comes with the winChain Template Generator, which you can use to create a skeleton application that you can write code into and then build easily. Just launch the generator, give it your Name and your Application's Name, choose a folder to put it in ("iphone-apps" in your cygwin folder recommended, or you'll have to edit your Makefile!), and it will make the project for you.