Filed under: Developer, Linux, Apple, Novell, Commercial, iPhone, Mobile
monoTouch .net development kit now available for iPhone
by Paul O'Brien Sep 14th 2009 at 1:00PM
While the Apple App Store is without doubt the largest available medium for a mobile developer to get their app in the hands of the users, for developers new to development using C / Objective C, the barrier to entry can be quite significant. Many developers working with other platforms (particularly Windows / Windows Mobile) have made significant investment into products developed in the .net languages (e.g. C#, VB.net) and therefore may be reluctant to completely port their application to a completely new environment.
Enter Novell with a commercial offering of their open source 'Mono' .net runtime dubbed 'monoTouch'.
Available immediately, monoTouch enables applications developed in any .net language to run on the iPhone. Significantly, monoTouch provides .net bindings to native API, allowing application developers will have access to iPhone specific functionality from within their .net applications. monoTouch integrates with both the free MonoDevelop IDE as well as Apple's XCode toolkit.
Applications developed using monoTouch compile completely to native code - they are not JIT compiled or interpreted.
While Mono itself is an open source project, monoTouch is very much a commercial offering. The entry point for monoTouch is the 'Personal Edition'', which is targeted at single developers looking to deploy applications on the App Store. The Personal Edition is priced at $399, although it should be noted that if you plan to publish your applications you will need to sign up for the iPhone Developer program at an additional cost of $99. monoTouch pricing for enterprise deployments starts at $999 for a single developer with a discounted $3999 package available for a team of 5 developers.
Novell don't currently make any mention of supporting other platforms in a similar way (we're obviously thinking Android here), however it seems a logical progression to enable MonoTouch developers to deploy their applications on as many platforms as possible.
Of course, when it comes to leveraging your assets on multiple platforms, .net is already a good choice for the desktop - as well as being supported on all Windows systems, mono is also available for Linux and Mac.
[via Infoworld]
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
sRc said 1:52PM on 9-14-2009
I like this. its nice to just fire up my UNR Eee instead of my big machines and Mono up one of my Windows tools
Reply
jim said 2:21PM on 9-14-2009
This is based on microsoft's policy of "embrace,extend and extinguish"...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
now microsoft is clearly targetting to destroy iphone platform...
This mono project is always in controversy in linux platform...
Reply
stewart.tootill said 10:44PM on 9-14-2009
Who mentioned microsoft?
Scopique said 1:04PM on 9-15-2009
No one mentioned MS. Some people just like to take any opportunity to start flaming (and Jim is apparently flaming a lot).