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Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac

blog.xamarin.com

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Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac

#101

Post by eropple »

migueldeicaza wrote: post #95
eropple wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MonoMac appears to be ASL/X11. MacCore too. https://github.com/mono/monomac The code is licensed under the terms of the open source Apache License version 2 or the MIT X11 license, at your own choice. Also, the Mono wiki indicates you can already deploy to the App Store (which I've been looking at doing for a project): http://www.mono-project.com/MonoMacPackager With the new release of the MonoMac add-in for MonoDeve…

The MonoMacPackager no longer exists, and has not existed for a few months. We basically granted a license for appstore distribution to anyone that requested the license for AppStore distribution, since we did not originally have plans to build a product. Now that we are launching a product, we offer the license as part of Xamarin.Mac. I will update the page accordingly.

OK, that makes sense. I mean, for an independent developer, that sucks, because it's honestly not worth $399 to me (I'd be happy to pay for it in a corporate setting like we do for MonoTouch, because of the support stuff, but for personal-project stuff I just can't rationalize it), but I get the reasoning.

Is the licensing for MonoMac/MacCore remaining as-is?

Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac

#102

Post by eropple »

lwat wrote: post #92
pudquick wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have missed the part where Apple relented on that: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20015954-264.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/09/09Statement-by-Apple... "In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we n…

There's still no flash on my iPad though.

But you can use Flash to build iOS applications, though. (Or, rather, ActionScript; there are a number of different tools that allow this.)

Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac

#103

Post by jbigelow76 »

danabramov wrote: post #97
danabramov wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, reading that makes it sound like a C# developer that wants to work with MonoTouch will have to verge off to learning at least some Objective C if they want to have shippable code. Yes, you'll definitely need to learn some things about Objective C. This isn't really about learning the language itself though. It's more about understanding iOS and ObjC runtime. The closest analogy to C# develop would be COM…

If I could give advice to myself when I started writing production code in MonoTouch without any experience with it, it would be: “Don't Guess. Profile.” For example, I spent a lot of time making sure I don't load heavy .NET objects, but most memory crashes went away when I started using JPG instead of PNG pictures in a picture-heavy app. Then it got a lot better when I took time to learn about best iOS practices suc…

Thank you for taking the time to provide these tips and links. Lots of good info here that I'm sure I'll be referring back to in the not too distant future.

Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac

#104

Post by eropple »

yawn wrote: post #44
georgemcbay wrote: post #38

Looks nice, but as with MonoTouch the pricing kills it for me. While I'm sure it pays for itself in overall value if you actually ship a product with it, attaching a price that high to a development tool causes (IMO) all sorts of secondary effects like balkanized user community, inability to realistically use it for writing open source software that anyone will collaborate on, etc. If the product cost more like $99 i…

I used MonoTouch at work (where price was not an issue) to convert an existing project to iOS. Aside from some minor complaints about the editor, the experience was amazing. I had previously written a couple of iOS apps using the "native" toolset, and I would not go back if I had the choice. While I understand your pain (I would gladly fork over $100 as a lone developer/hobbyist for personal development, but can't ha…

I've been playing with it on my own, and I tend to agree. MonoDevelop is still pretty rough--I'm doing game stuff, so I'm kicking any actual OS X development down the road as far as humanly possible--but once you get your code deploying, it's a very nice setup.

I'd really like a way to build in VS (maybe against dummy assemblies or something) and kick it over to my MBP for real compilation and deployment, though. I respect their desire to funnel users through MonoDevelop, but it doesn't step to VS+R#.

Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac

#106

Post by eropple »

dested wrote: post #77
yawn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used MonoTouch at work (where price was not an issue) to convert an existing project to iOS. Aside from some minor complaints about the editor, the experience was amazing. I had previously written a couple of iOS apps using the "native" toolset, and I would not go back if I had the choice. While I understand your pain (I would gladly fork over $100 as a lone developer/hobbyist for personal development, but can't ha…

Can you go into some issues with the editor?

-As mentioned in the sibling comment, stability is a problem.

-Refactoring support isn't great. It's about on par with stock Visual Studio, but stock Visual Studio isn't good compared to VS+R# or IntelliJ. If you're writing "just" an iOS application, I can see this not being a huge deal, but my own use case is bringing over projects for OS X and iOS where I tend to have a lot of code and I'm very used to being able to do massive, contextual refactorings when needed. Can't do that in MonoDevelop.

-It's GTK#, so you have to accept that some stuff just doesn't feel native on a Mac. My mental map of keyboard behaviors no longer properly applies and it's jarring going between it and XCode or IDEA. It's gotten a lot better since I started using it on a Mac, to be sure, but it's not there yet. I compare it here to IDEA, which is also not Mac-native, but manages to feel a lot closer.

Now, one huge, huge plus, that I have to give them a ton of credit for: unlike Visual Studio, MonoDevelop is non-destructive toward project files. This is a power-user beef but a really important one once you get there; if you've hand-edited a csproj, Visual Studio will happily destroy all of your changes (it loads the csproj into an in-memory object model and writes it back out on save). This is infuriating when you have custom stuff in it - something as simple as a wildcard path in a file reference (which is totally fine as per MSBuild rules) will be mashed into a static list of all files at time of invocation. It is super bad, and if MonoDevelop improves some more I might switch to it, even on Windows, solely because of that lack of misfeature.

Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac

#107

Post by danek »

edwinnathaniel wrote: post #47
danek wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lately I've been using embedded chromium to solve the write once/run anywhere/look great everywhere problem. While java isn't going away anytime soon, it's nice to see it incrementally lose applicability.

Embedded Chromium may work for simple stuff but I questioned it for a more complex desktop app (e.g.: http://almworks.com/jiraclient/ ) from development, feature-rich, and maintainability perspective.

you could argue chromium is better for those same reasons ;) spotify is a good example of where this works well.

Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac

#108

Post by danek »

eatsleepdrink wrote: post #55
azakai wrote: post #43

Cool stuff. Now how about running C# apps on the web? :)

You can also do javascript with it. I can't speak to it personally but friends have used Script# ( http://scriptsharp.com/ ) for client-side javascript with good results. Never heard of anyone attempting node.js with it... yet.

scriptsharp: I saw it used/had to help maintain for a rather big project...never again... :(

Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac

#109

Post by migueldeicaza »

eropple wrote: post #101
migueldeicaza wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MonoMacPackager no longer exists, and has not existed for a few months. We basically granted a license for appstore distribution to anyone that requested the license for AppStore distribution, since we did not originally have plans to build a product. Now that we are launching a product, we offer the license as part of Xamarin.Mac. I will update the page accordingly.

OK, that makes sense. I mean, for an independent developer, that sucks , because it's honestly not worth $399 to me (I'd be happy to pay for it in a corporate setting like we do for MonoTouch, because of the support stuff, but for personal-project stuff I just can't rationalize it), but I get the reasoning. Is the licensing for MonoMac/MacCore remaining as-is?

Yes, MonoMac/MacCore will continue to be MIT X11.

We will also continue to maintain it, as it shares most of the code for Xamarin.Mac

Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac

#110

Post by migueldeicaza »

edwinnathaniel wrote: post #45
natfriedman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but write-once-run-anywhere solutions deliver mediocre user experiences on every platform. You don't want your Mac app to look anything like your Windows 8 app. With Xamarin you separate the presentation layer of your app from the rest of the app, and the only thing you're rewriting from platform to platform is the UI. Typically this is only about 25% of the code (though of course it can vary). This is how our c…

Not every app has to be beautiful and super-usable though (most business/productivity apps). If an app can achieve 80% of the usability cross-platform without doing much tweak, I'd say that's a good investment from the publisher perspective.

Agreed, not every app has to be done in that way, and for that there are plenty of alternative solutions.

From HTML to Java, to Gtk# and a dozen more.

This is a set of tools for developers that need to take advantage of native APIs, either for the UI, accessing the advanced audio features in OSX, accessing Darwin features, integrating with StoreKit, iCloud, Apple's OpenGL extensions, SceneKit, Bluetooth and those sorts of things from C#.

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