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Your argument makes no sense at all. First of all, there are already lots of ways to build iPhone apps without using a Mac, like Unity 3D or MonoTouch. So you don't need a Mac, even without a JVM or Flash player.

Do you even know what you are talking about? MonoTouch lets your write in .NET languages, but still requires a Mac.Unity 3D is a gaming platform, I'm sure everyone wants to just write games....

So refute rants all you want, but at least make sense while doing so.

If a complete Flash Player and Java are on the iPhone, everyone can develop for the iPhone without an SDK, everyone can publish/sell applications without the crApp Store.

Your argument makes no sense at all. First of all, there are already lots of ways to build iPhone apps without using a Mac, like Unity 3D or MonoTouch. So you don't need a Mac, even without a JVM or Flash player.

Secondly, you wouldn't be able to publish and sell apps if a JVM or Flash Player would exist on an iPhone, because without jailbreaking the device, the only way to install apps remains through the App Store. Supporting Java or Flash has nothing to do with the way apps are distributed.

Rant all you want, but at least make sense while doing so.

It's interesting if that is indeed the case, because there are a lot of apps out there that have been written using Unity3D...

...ever looked at Unity's requirements for the iPhone edition?

You must be an approved Apple Developer for the iPhone and install the iPhone SDK (requires Intel-based Mac running OSX 10.5.4 or later)

It's interesting if that is indeed the case, because there are a lot of apps out there that have been written using Unity3D...

My guess is approximately zero seconds, as Apple is sure to kill this.

Why would Apple want to kill this?

MonoTouch is not significantly different from Unity 3D, which has been used to create over 40 games for iPhone already.

The primary difference is, instead of needing to create user interfaces purely atop GL, you can use the CocoaTouch libraries and get native buttons, frames, html controls, etc.

Someone better tell the Unity Game Engine developers then, they just introduced a new plugin for Wii (and I'm sure they're not the only ones).

http://unity3d.com/

Is a very good 3D plugin

http://www.fusionfall.com/splashpage.html

A good example from cartoon Network.

Unity (a game development platform) translates JavaScript (and Python) into .NET CLR opcodes and then runs them via Mono, which ends up being quite a bit faster than just running the JavaScript in a traditional interpreter.

SquirrelFish (a bytecode interpreter in WebKit) and V8 (a native JIT compiler in Chrome) are also available to speed things up.

Looking at it from the .NET CLR bytecode perspective, Silverlight 2.0 is available on Windows platforms and OS X (Intel); once Moonlight hits 2.0, that'll make a similar system available for the UNIXy OSes...

With things like these, JavaScript probably isn't awful for computationally-expensive work.

See also Unity 3D, which features a cross-platform (well, Windows and OS X) 3D engine browser plug-in. Spiffy demo here.

AFAICT people use mono to go MS 'native' - meaning .Net - when needed. The only non-trivial application in Mono I can think of right now is Unity, and that's a closed-source RT3D toolkit for x-plattform developement on Mac OS X. And apparently a very good one at that. They are being bugged left, right and center to deliver on Windows. And are preparing that now.

I have to admit that Mono has gotten me curious, because Monodevelop is a very neat looking IDE, C# doesn't seem so much of a PITA than C++ or Java and it appears to be more suitable for stronger ties to multimedia hardware than Java. I still haven't seen a convincing multimedia app in Java in 10 years, allthough the current 3D stuff with native OpenGL does look and run well.
On top of that it appears to me that Mono apps are easyer to deploy that Java apps. I'd expect Java developement to get up to speed fast in any revent Version of Netbeans. However, I catch myself still trusting Mono for good performance more than Java.

Bottom line:
Going Mono to me basically means nothing other than spending time learning C# and watching out that no MS dependancies sneak into my work. A risk I'd be willing to take, given that it has evolved into a feasable tool recently. However, the don't-trust-MS arguments delivered here are valid, and you ought to know what you're doing and calculate your risks well when dicking with MS-controlled tech.

http://www.plasticscm.com/

Check out Unity 3D, a multi-platform 3D IDE focused on letting you use 1 of 3 languages (Javascript, C# or a Python variant) to do all the scripting of your game objects. It's extremely awesome and fun work and I've seen some great games created with it. It makes it all the better that they can run on Mac and Windows, on the desktop or via the browser. Sad for Linux folks who can't play their games yet though. http://www.unity3d.com/

Jim,

Thanks for the hard work on the Linux Foundation. This is probably the first time that most of us have even hear of you. I would suggest that your role is probably to take a lot of the flak that people give you and turn it into shinola. A demanding job, I'm sure. With that being said...

In addition, feel free to blame me for high gas prices, most of the pot holes in San Francisco, and for the crappy wifi at every single Linux Conference.

Sarcasm is almost never a productive or endearing characteristic of a leader. An unflappable upbeat attitude, however... One of my favorite people in this regard has been Tom Higgins, now at Unity 3D. He was booted off of the Macromedia Director team as the product advocate and he never once made an unfavorable remark about it, to anyone, even though he knew that he was going to have to start all over and that Director development was being shipped off to India (and the original development team was simply wiped off of the map) where it has since met its demise, for all intents and purposes. Higgins remained upbeat throughout, and remains a heck of a nice guy, and a heck of an advocate:
http://unity3d.com/blogs/tom/

Just my two cents, and remember that most of us Linux users are pretty nice people who enjoy the Linux community and what it stands for. Thanks for being our representative!

seconded, this engine is very friendly to artists with a bit of coding experience, i'd check it out if you have a mac.

This is sort of a weird issue that seems to come up whenever someone has a game concept, but suddenly become intimidated by the industry and the overwhelming quality of the content they generate. The fact is, you don't need a huge team of developers and technicians to produce a great game. You just need a good idea and a couple people with enough determination and skill to make it happen.

Heck, look at the first person shooter genre. It was initially brought to life by only two people who loved to play games. Now, it's a multi-billion dollar industry and the resulting engines produced each year often creates the standards for which all other games are judged.

Nowadays, you don't even need to be a programming genius capable of juggling dozens of complex equations to produce content. You can now get fairly simple to use game development tools, such as Unity to design prototypes and tweak things until it finally feels right. Even if it doesn't end up being the final product, having a working prototype can make a huge difference in even pitching your concepts to other, larger developers. (The ones in charge of such decisions often need visual aids beyond just a storyboard or sketch, since they likely aren't developers themselves.)

If not anything else, even Flash can work in a pinch for prototyping or development.

"<a>"

http://unity3d.com/

there's an example of a commercial product on Mac OS X using Mono.

I don't know about "intentionally shutting out" other platforms, but it's pretty clear that Windows will always be the only first-tier .NET platform. That said, I'm currently evaluating Unity an up-and-coming Mac game engine that uses Mono.

It absolutely is optimized in software. That's ridiculous. My own little informal tests have put it high and above Newton and ODE for a lot of cases, and who knows about Havok. (too damn expensive to try)

I think most people don't realize it's a great physics engine by itself that has the added bonus of supporting dedicated hardware. Plus, a lot of the larger developers presumably have source access, so if it doesn't look optimized or if there are big /* LOL THIS'll MAKE EM BUY A CARD */ comments... well... Unreal 3 and everyone else wouldn't be using it would it then?

An engine like this? http://www.unity3d.com

Is a little company hidden away in the ATI rooms demoing a wicked game engine called Unity. I can't begin to say how great this thing looks. They'll be demoing on Thursday and Friday, too.