Slashdot Mirror
Novell Bringing .Net Developers To Apple iPad
GMGruman writes "Paul Krill reports that Apple's new iPad could be easier to write apps for, thanks to Novell's MonoTouch development platform, which helps .Net developers create code for the iPad and fully comply with Apple's licensing requirements — without having to use Apple's preferred Objective-C. This news falls on the footsteps of news that Citrix will release an iPad app that lets users run Windows sessions on the iPad. These two developments bolster an argument that the iPad could eventually displace the netbook."
The iPad is one product...Netbooks are a genre of device. Add to that the aversion of folks like me to using anything put out by Apple, and I don't see much chance of the iPad replacing a whole genre of DIY-friendly hardware.
Jesus christ stop with the Apple spam.
There are already RDP clients for the iPhone and Mono Touch isn't freaking new.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
What's going on? This is Steve's baby. He's been working on a "new Newton" since, what, 2000? Well, his perfectionism payed off and now the ones who aren't laughing are the ones who don't give a shit. Hey guys! Let's make an iPhone, but bigger, and a gajillion times more expensive! They'll love it, especially in this economy! More from that last one:
Here's an idea - What Steve should have done was release a tablet version of the MacBook Air (with the exact same software compatibility, OS, etc.) and call it the MacBook Slate or MacBook Touch. I would have bought one of those, and I'm often the first to question the sexual orientation of male Mac users.
As someone who's programmed both in .net and for the iPhone, I can't imagine that being able to program in .net would be an advantage. Both are adequate for making windowing systems, but the paradigm is different.
Seriously, Objective-C isn't that hard; if you can't learn it in a day or two (or at most a week) then you are probably not a professional programmer.
Qxe4
... the next 60 days, amirite?
The iPad has been officially announced for all of two days, a vanishingly small portion of people have actually spent any time playing with one, and the world is already full of vociferous opinions about its prospects for (pick one) dismal failure/niche success/displacing netbooks/world domination. Like this one:
Because of its price and lack of perennial netbook features, such as a physical keyboard.
Looks to me like it doesn't lack for a physical keyboard, even if it's not permanently attached. Will that be a problem for literal laptop users? Maybe. If I were betting, though, I'd guess that it'll be good enough that Apple's sales will compare with the top 3 netbook manufacturers.
I'm not betting, however, because like most of the planet, I haven't had a chance to really play with one, and therefore don't have a very solid idea what I'm talking about.
Tweet, tweet.
Umm no.
1 - its far more expensive
2 - it has no keyboard
3 - did i mention it was expensive?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'd be very interested in this but the last time I check it doesn't support .NET's remoting API's such as webservices.
I'd want to be able to make rich thin clients that talk to application layer servers but Apple always make sure the garden is well walled.
Hmm, nope. That doesn't work either.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
I'm getting a good laugh out of all the folks damning the iPhone for it's lack of explicit multi-tasking.
Sigh. If one wants to oversimplify there have been two great visions presented in computing. One was eberharts classic video showing off mouse and button based editing, along with cellular communications. If you've never watched it, you have no idea what you have missed. Prepare to crap your pants.
The other is Raskin's dream of the info appliance. A device that has no specific function but morphs itself into the perfect dedicated human interaction device for whatever task is needed. It does not multi task. It does not improve a perfectly weighted japanese sushi knife to attach car steering wheel and fire extinguisher to it just in case you need to multi-task. Each item itself has all the controls and human interface it needs for it's task and only that.
In raskin's vision, the appliance would never need instructions. it would be as obvious how to use it as a hammer is.
The ipad is the closest (practical sized) realization of that to date. it's 1.5 times the width of your fingers so it balances perfectly in one hand. when you have a task it dedicated it's surface to becoming the perfect human perceptual interface you need just for that task.
The key here is that Even a 1 year old understands the iphone interface. It's task specificity is intuitive.
Moreover you don't really want multi-taksing. You think you do but what you really mean is you want to beable to context swtich easily and for cases where apps need to interact that they do so in the way you want them to. Multi-tasking is a dumb way to do this. it puts the load for managing the interaction on the human not the device. The iphone os does most of the connections you want. The addressbook is ubiquitous, apps can send e-mail and get web pages. etc... In the future this conduit management will be handled more and more by the computer as it should be. Context switching will be transparent because the computer will anticipate your next move and have pre-warmed it. etc...
Multi-tasking is just the current way we approximate implement this metafore for the device that simply changes into what we need at that moment by itself. You don't really want multi-tasking you want that effect.
For example, people insisted background processing was needed to handle incoming e-mail or other daemon tasks for apps. But the vast majority of those needs (though definitiely not all) are now served much better by the push notification deamon that apple implemented. See background processing was just one way to solve that problem that you were used. You did not need it and you are now better off without it.
interestingly it's claimed that OSX was originally going to behave that way at Job's request. there's a hidden mode switch (in the defaults.write ) that will change the interface so only one app is visible at a time. the others snap to the dock at each context switch. I activated that for my mother and here ability to use the computer skyrocketed. I've tried it myself, and because I multi-task a lot I do find the transistions annoying. But I have to admit it really does de clutter and improve how you interface with an app. I just find the implementation to clunky to tolerate and I miss my multi-tasking view. The iphone OS enforces this work mode and anyone who has used one can see how well it works in the small format device.
It's raskin's dream incarnate. This is why other devices that don't get what's being created here are going to fail.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Shouldn't we be waiting until, oh I don't know, the device actually is released and we can see how this whole thing plays out?
It's almost like Slashdot is perpetually trying to make up for that whole "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." thing.
#DeleteChrome
The problem isn't that developers can't develop well, the problem is that Apple doesn't let developers do much with iPhone OS.
I guess all 140K applications do the same exact thing? Since Apple "doesn't et you do much".
The reality is that Apple has a few areas they don't let you go, but everything else is wide open.
The nice thing about a netbook or a cheap laptop is I can run multiple things. I can keep my Facebook open, my IM open, play music on YouTube and type on a document all at the same time.
And on an iPad (or iPhone) you can play music while you type a document, and get a stream of notifications when there's some new twitter or facebook post you really care about. Or you can write and jump quickly into a twitter/facebook app to see what is going on and jump back - because the device has been optimized for that use, unlike a traditional PC where application startup is more expensive and lengthy.
These are basic things that people do daily, the lack of a major component of today's web (Flash)
What? Where is is major use? It's widespread to be sure, but I question that it is such an important aspect of using the web today. I installed ClickToFlash on Safari about a year ago, and the ONLY flash I have had occasion to click on to see have been videos - all on sites that simply feed the h.264 the flash video player is already using under the covers, directly to the device. In the meantime I have also been spared a horde of annoying, battery sucking ads - and I never did believe in adblock because I like supporting sites. It's just that the number of Flash elements per page was getting to be absurd, with a ton of Flash overhead consuming the CPU.
Other than video use, the other major use of Flash is web based gaming - are you really arguing the iPhone/iPad platform is hurting for free casual games? There are so many games out now you could probably play free trial or ad supported versions of games for a year straight before you ran out of things to try. There is no Flash based game so compelling it would make people choose a platform, EXCEPT possibly for Farmville due to the large number of players who would like constant access to it. But there I imagine we'll see an iPhone app at some point.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you want to learn how to develop for the iPhone OS then you need to learn Objective-C.
I don't care if you have an existing codebase in C#. You are going to have to expose your code as generic webservices anyway since Mono for the iPhone does not support .NET remoting anyway. Once your "cloud" services are available as standard web services, they can be accessed by any language and it makes sense to learn the main native language of the iPhone OS platform.
Trying to use Mono Touch as a crutch smacks of laziness and fear of learning.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Personally, I think the iPad is a good idea. However, I also think that while the app store is a useful evil on the iPhone, it's going to be death for the iPad.
Why? What apps are there really that are being blocked? Google Voice, SlingBox over 3G and...? Yawn. I know there's a list of interesting rejected apps, the losses are minimal, and while lamentable, a drop in the bucket compared with what software *is* available.
On the contrary, the App Store is one of the single most important factors in the success of the iPhone and now the iPad. Yes, the geek-types will lament the control imposed by the app store, and for myself, I'd prefer an official opt-in jailbreak mode, but in terms of mass appeal, the hinderance caused by the control is absolutely dwarfed by the benefit brought about by the single marketplace for discovering and downloading new apps and games.
Perhaps, but as a woman I can definitely tell you that all my women friends have agreed it's an unfortunate name because the first thing it makes us think of is feminine hygiene products.
Sure, today. Give it some time and iPad will just be another word, like Wii. People made the same arguments against the Wii. This too shall pass.
Not to say anything negative about Apple here, but to those of us not in the gamer community, Wii still sounds asinine.
You couldn't have that any more backwards. The Wii is the one console that appeals to non-gamers.
People may still snicker at the name, I'm not saying that's going away. People still make "iPood" jokes. But the name "Wii" is no longer seen as a liability.
C# is standardized, but open source/cross platform implementations (Mono) are behind those from Microsoft.
IIRC, in terms of language implementation, Mono is actually not beyond Visual C# - at least all C# 3.5 features seem to be fully supported. Where Mono lags behind is the libraries, and generally those which aren't covered by the Ecma CLI spec.
Java is very stable, but given the number of releases I would say less solid (it's on its seventh major release, with a beta for it's eighth). Based loosely on C++, but with garbage collection (no pointers), it is really the only system that produces true cross-platform binaries.
CLR (.NET) binaries are equally cross-platform, since a basic implementation of CLR VM is fairly trivial. Both Mono and Portable.NET are good enough to run the binaries on all platforms they themselves run on. The problem with portability is also due to libraries.
It makes perfect sense, though I've no idea if the analogy is valid. He said you can write with only hiragana, but it makes a person look uneducated. This is completely true.
It does not improve a perfectly weighted japanese sushi knife to attach car steering wheel and fire extinguisher to it just in case you need to multi-task. Each item itself has all the controls and human interface it needs for it's task and only that.
That is a broken analogy. Each one of those devices has hard-set physical characteristics that inherently conflict with each other. The iPad can do multiple things, but not concurrently. Their UI is in no way hard set to preclude any of the functions people are asking about. A knife can never be a reasonable steering wheel ever, it isn't just that it can't cut and be a wheel at the same time.
In raskin's vision, the appliance would never need instructions. it would be as obvious how to use it as a hammer is.
And yet I see in hands on demos people trying various random gestures, and requiring the Apple rep to demonstrate what gesture was needed to perform a task. Notably, pinch to 'go back', how the hell is that intuitive?
Moreover you don't really want multi-taksing. You think you do but what you really mean is you want to beable to context swtich easily and for cases where apps need to interact that they do so in the way you want them to.
People don't complain about WebOS's realization of small form-factor multitasking, where each app is a full-screened app at pretty much all times. You seem to be attacking the multi-window model, which is a fair thing to question particularly in small form factors, but forbidding a program from executing in the background (doing non-interactive things like receiving instant messages or manipulating audio, etc) is asinine. I wonder what your post will be when Apple does finally cave to allowing third-party apps to background execute, it will happen I can guarantee.
For example, people insisted background processing was needed to handle incoming e-mail or other daemon tasks for apps. But the vast majority of those needs (though definitiely not all) are now served much better by the push notification deamon that apple implemented. See background processing was just one way to solve that problem that you were used. You did not need it and you are now better off without it.
Umm, you do realize that the daemon they implemented is explicitly a form of background processing? Apple *needs* it to deliver the things they need, and they allow themselves the privilege of background execution, they just deny it to third parties.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.