I'd really appreciate better pricing (e.g. risk free, pay after you succeed, etc..), at least for Android platform.
What if your potential customers demanded risk free pricing? They get to use their software for free till they start seeing value. Would you agree to that? If not, why are you expecting Xamarin to do that for you?
Frankly speaking, if 400$ for a product like MonoTouch is risk for you then you probably shouldn't be developing commercial software which you sell for money.
You claim cross-platform apps, but then you have two development packages. Mono for iOS and Mono for Android. If I develop on Mono for iOS can I take the exact same code and plop it down on the Android version?
You claim cross-platform apps, but then you have two development packages. Mono for iOS and Mono for Android. If I develop on Mono for iOS can I take the exact same code and plop it down on the Android version?
No, but your backend code is the same.
I'm using MonoTouch and Mono for Android for some game development right now. My per-platform projects are five to six classes apiece (all but one pushed into my IoC container by the last one), and everything else is shared. Obviously, for a non-game application, you'll have more, but they'll be mostly UI-based.
You claim cross-platform apps, but then you have two development packages. Mono for iOS and Mono for Android. If I develop on Mono for iOS can I take the exact same code and plop it down on the Android version?
No, but you can share a lot of common non-UI code.
Some very useful practices to get good code re-use are described in the book "Professional Cross-Platform Mobile Development in C#" by Olson et al.
I'm looking forward to what they come up with next. There's a tremendous opportunity here to streamline the mobile dev process and things like Mono.Dialog can be a huge time saver.
I figured they were finished after they left Novell but they've pulled off one of the most impressive resurrections in recent tech history.
I'd really appreciate better pricing (e.g. risk free, pay after you succeed, etc..), at least for Android platform.
Our free trial never expires and lets you try the platform in the emulator/simulator for as long as you like. As for the paid product, we issue a no-questions-asked refund to anyone who requests it within some reasonable amount of time (30 days usually). Even with this, our refund rate is less than 1%.
I'd personally like to see something like a non-commercial/OSS-only "hobbyist" license (maybe $150-200?). I really want to use MonoDroid outside the emulator but don't see myself doing mobile commercially anytime soon, so $400 is tough to swallow.
That said, I totally understand if that's not a market Xamarin wants to be in.
>Xamarin enables millions of experienced C# programmers to become mobile developers very quickly. But most of them don’t know about us! We’re going to fix that.
I hope step 1 for "fixing that" is a name change. Seriously, developers talk just as much off-line as online about their tools and Xamarin has serious off-line confusion issues.
I'd really appreciate better pricing (e.g. risk free, pay after you succeed, etc..), at least for Android platform.
What if your potential customers demanded risk free pricing? They get to use their software for free till they start seeing value. Would you agree to that? If not, why are you expecting Xamarin to do that for you? Frankly speaking, if 400$ for a product like MonoTouch is risk for you then you probably shouldn't be developing commercial software which you sell for money.
But the corollary is the guy that wants to make a silly app and give it away for free as a hobby. For instance, I wanted to make a very particular kind of timer application for playing Diablo, primarily for myself but give it away, and the $400 price point makes me not want to use monodroid for it. Of course, I'm not really Xamarin's target market per se, and given the post I made about HBO's pricing so I can understand their position. However, as someone that is in the segment of people the OP is talking about, I can sympathize.