EARLIER this week we wrote about MonoTouch, namely about it being blocked by Apple [1, 2, 3]. MonoTouch brings Mono to Apple products and in turn it can also bring Moonlight, which would only contribute to proprietary software plug-ins like Silver Lie and Adobe Flash (which Apple also blocks). From Apple's point of view, it is doing the right thing and we cannot complain. "Whining to Apple" is "an exercise in futility," says this new article on the subject.
Apple has set the developer guidelines in a way that benefits them and doesn’t care whether Novell is worried about the standing of MonoTouch or not. You either believe, or even just agree to the terms of the Apple vision or you don’t Apple and Jobs couldn’t careless even if that means that like Adobe and possibly Novell your company has to take a big hit.
Third parties, including Adobe and Novell, have released tools that translate code for execution on the iPhone. Adobe produces the Flash-to-iPhone cross-compiler, and Novell develops MonoTouch, a tool that brings .NET development to the iPhone.
Things just got a whole lot more restrictive for iPhone developers. What this change means is that developers can no longer use software like Novell's MonoTouch, Unity3D, or Ansca's Corona to develop iPhone applications, and tools like Appcelerator's Titanium and PhoneGap are looking questionable. MonoTouch, Unity3D, and Corona allow developers to use the C# language and Lua scripting, respectively, to write iPhone applications. Titanium and PhoneGap allow application development using JavaScript and HTML; because they use WebKit behind the scenes to run that JavaScript, they might be OK.
A January 2009 Ars Technica article by Ryan Paul explains how Mono had been getting past Apple's rules and regulations up to now: For iPhone, it uses a concept called ahead-of-time compilation, which involves pre-compiling the assemblies in such a way that the Mono platform can convert them into native code, before a JIT compiler would have done the equivalent.
Adobe, the king of Internet video with 95% Web browser market penetration, is not one bit happy about being locked out of Apple's lucrative mobile device market. Novell's MonoTouch group is "reaching out to Apple for clarification on their intention, and believe there is plenty of room for course-correction prior to the final release of the 4.0 SDK." Adobe, which doesn't want to let go of its hold on Internet-based video, isn't anything like as optimistic.
But Gruber couldn't figure a way out of it for Adobe and sees implications for a range of programming tools, many of them designed to let programmers target different devices with the same project. Another one is Novell's MonoTouch, which lets programmer's using Microsoft's C# programming language and associated .Net technology write for the iPhone and iPad.
--Richard Stallman
Comments
Needs Sunlight
2010-04-15 18:36:28
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2010-04-15 18:41:44
Controlled opposition is a powerful tool.