Does this use "native" OS X components?
Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac
41–50 of 149 posts
Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the feedback. We definitely have two classes of customers - businesses and professional developers who can't believe how cheap our products are relative to the value they're receiving, and hobbyists who are more price-sensitive. It's tricky to balance these two.
That makes sense, here's another idea. At my day job the price of your product is perfect. Its an enterprise app that we want to support on all 3 mobile platforms, which we sell for $5k a pop (and another $200k * N in hardware). $600 is actually cheap (though so is my company, so we probably wouldn't pay more than $1k). On the other hand, at home I couldn't afford more then $200. When I make an app at home, its for m…
Some of our competitors have done this and we've received very negative feedback from their customers about per-app, per-user, and royalty-based pricing.
Also not sure it makes sense to create a price incentive to bundle a bunch of functionality into a single app.
We like having simple, fair, obvious pricing. Even if it means leaving some money on the table.
Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac
#43Cool stuff. Now how about running C# apps on the web? :)
Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac
#44Looks 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 hand over $400), I think the price tag is completely justified.
Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at all. This offers a completely different solution than java. With java, you write once and run on everything. This lets you write C# on OS X, but it won't compile and run on Windows or Linux. Windows software can't be as easily ported to OS X either, the entire GUI, at the least, will have to be rewritten. I would argue that Python would make more sense as a java-killer. It has the write once, run everywhere th…
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.
Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac
#46Does this use "native" OS X components?
Yeah, they just bind to the existing libraries, so you end up using all of the native tools.
Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at all. This offers a completely different solution than java. With java, you write once and run on everything. This lets you write C# on OS X, but it won't compile and run on Windows or Linux. Windows software can't be as easily ported to OS X either, the entire GUI, at the least, will have to be rewritten. I would argue that Python would make more sense as a java-killer. It has the write once, run everywhere th…
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.
Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac
#48Cool stuff. Now how about running C# apps on the web? :)
Not sure if kidding, or serious :P http://asp.net/mvc
Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I think computing power has hit the point where Java desktop apps and applets aren't that big a deal. I've got one running on my desktop right now. It runs for day's on end without being a significant burden to the rest of the system.
It's the quality of the experience, GUI, not just the resource-hoging of Java Desktop app. And even for that "It runs for day's on end without being a significant burden to the rest of the system" is hardly something to write home about.
That depends on the app-developer experience building GUI. Maybe most Java developers aren't that sensitive when it comes to GUI (or maybe it's a culture thing).
Having said that, not all apps have to be excellent 100% in terms of usability and beautiful-UI. Once I step out from the HN-bubble a bit I'm starting to see people using ugly but usable and solved business problems type of app written in anything from Tcl/TK, Java, Qt, Pascal, etc.
Re: Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac
#50Looks 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…
Yes for $99 for individual developer. PLEASE.