Filed under: Developer, Linux, Apple, Novell, Commercial, iPhone, Mobile
monoTouch .net development kit now available for iPhone
by Paul O'Brien Sep 14th 2009
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.
The Download Squad team got really excited this morning. When we contemplated installing Paint-Mono, we pictured it and GIMP arming themselves with swords, screaming "There can be only one!" We thought there would be an epic battle, and the victor would lop off the other's head in a firestorm of light.
The open source Mono Project, which is sponsored in part by Novell, Inc. announced today that it has developed a Visual Basic compiler which allows software written in Microsoft's most widely used application programming language to be compiled and run on any platform which Mono supports. Until this announcement, Visual Basic applications could only be run on the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. 
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
