7 ms·

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, attac

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 it might be able to overcome the inertia a bit better. I know I'd be willing to buy it for that even if I wasn't sure I'd ship a product on it, but $399 is Real Money, so as hypothetically interested as I've been in MonoTouch, etc, I've never really looked at it beyond the press releases.

yawn 14y ago
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.
- dested 14y ago
  Can you go into some issues with the editor?
  - Itaxpica 14y ago
    Not the original commenter, but as someone who's done a lot of work with it: it lacks a lot of the features that I've come to expect from basically any modern IDE, but yet manages to crash twice as much as any other IDE I've ever used (and that includes Xcode).
  - eropple 14y ago
    -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.
- eropple 14y ago
  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#.
  - cdmckay 14y ago
    I don't think they're trying to funnel users to MonoDevelop, I think they're using it because the iOS SDK is for Mac. Take a look at Mono for Android, for example. It uses a VS plugin instead of MonoDevelop.
    - shadowmint 14y ago
      I might be in the minority here, but I use MonoDevelop in preference to visual studio. It's got a couple of irritating issues (the plugin support is rubbish even now, and it's ridiculously complicated to roll your own), but its just so fast. My morning at work is: git pull, go get coffee while VS spazzes out for 5 minutes and resharper reindexes everything.
      - wired8 14y ago
        Nothing a bit of RAM and a fast CPU can't fix... Alt if you have a very large solution with multiple projects you could split it up...
      - eropple 14y ago
        IMO, that sounds like an issue with your hardware. I use a three-year-old desktop with a Nehalem i7 and 16GB of RAM (or my rMBP with Parallels, which may be faster) and VS/R# is pretty happen even with 50+ projects and about 1600 source files. Older machine? Overactive anti-virus or something causing file I/O pain?
      - dbattaglia 14y ago
edwinnathaniel 14y ago
Yes for $99 for individual developer. PLEASE.
- starik36 14y ago
  Same, here. I'd eat it up at $99.
- rymith 14y ago
  Absolutely, as we see from the numbers, most iPhone apps aren't making a lot of money, so $400 + $100 for the app store access is simply dumb for an indie dev. Miguel is a very smart man and completely clueless at the same time.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - statictype 14y ago
    Consider the possibility that a) Miguel De Icaza doesn't set the pricing on the product b) Even if he did, that indie developers who are unable to fork over the $500-$2000 for a license are not part of their target demographic. Monotouch seems to be popular enough with their existing pricing that they don't need to address anything smaller (and FWIW, their products are too expensive for me too, as much as I would love to be writing Mac/iOS apps in C#, I'm not forking over that money for it)
untog 14y ago
so as hypothetically interested as I've been in MonoTouch, etc, I've never really looked at it beyond the press releases. Try downloading the evaluation version. It allows you to test with the simulator, and at least gives you a clue as to whether you might want to spend $399 on it. Of course, if there's no chance of that ever being the case it won't be a productive use of time.
simonh 14y ago
I'd have thought something more like the old Qt license tiering would make sense - a GPL version that can only be used to develop GPL apps and a commercially licensed version if you want to sell anything.
- natfriedman 14y ago
  The app store does not allow GPL'd apps.
  - icefox 14y ago
    And what about on the android and windows app stores?
    - brajkovic 14y ago
      Windows app store explicitly disallows open source, I believe. Android is the only one that does not.
      - Paradigma11 14y ago
        http://www.extremetech.com/computing/108551-windows-8-store-will-allow-open-source-apps-unlike-ios-and-mac http://www.extremetech.com/computing/108551-windows-8-store-...
  - rymith 14y ago
    No, the GPL does not allow for further restrictions. The App Store doesn't care.
    - lambda 14y ago
      The App Store adds restrictions that are incompatible with the GPL. Who exactly "cares" is somewhat irrelevant.
  - tzs 14y ago
    You can distribute your own GPL code through the App Store. You just can't include other people's GPL code. That would be enough for a useful "free for free software, pay for commercial development" model.
teyc 14y ago
As a hobbyist, you could always use MonoMac. It is still free and you may have to wrap the StoreKit APIs yourself.
- lucaspiller 14y ago
  +1. Xamarin.Mac just builds more on top of MonoMac. MonoMac has been used to publish apps to the App Store before: http://tirania.org/monomac/archive/2011/Jan-31.html http://tirania.org/monomac/archive/2011/Jan-31.html
jstedfast 14y ago
Just an FYI, but the MonoMac project (which is what Xamarin.Mac is based on) will be remaining as Open Source for that situation.

yawn 14y ago

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.

dested 14y ago
Can you go into some issues with the editor?
- Itaxpica 14y ago
  Not the original commenter, but as someone who's done a lot of work with it: it lacks a lot of the features that I've come to expect from basically any modern IDE, but yet manages to crash twice as much as any other IDE I've ever used (and that includes Xcode).
- eropple 14y ago
  -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.
eropple 14y ago
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#.
- cdmckay 14y ago
  I don't think they're trying to funnel users to MonoDevelop, I think they're using it because the iOS SDK is for Mac. Take a look at Mono for Android, for example. It uses a VS plugin instead of MonoDevelop.
  - shadowmint 14y ago
    I might be in the minority here, but I use MonoDevelop in preference to visual studio. It's got a couple of irritating issues (the plugin support is rubbish even now, and it's ridiculously complicated to roll your own), but its just so fast. My morning at work is: git pull, go get coffee while VS spazzes out for 5 minutes and resharper reindexes everything.
    - wired8 14y ago
      Nothing a bit of RAM and a fast CPU can't fix... Alt if you have a very large solution with multiple projects you could split it up...
    - eropple 14y ago
      IMO, that sounds like an issue with your hardware. I use a three-year-old desktop with a Nehalem i7 and 16GB of RAM (or my rMBP with Parallels, which may be faster) and VS/R# is pretty happen even with 50+ projects and about 1600 source files. Older machine? Overactive anti-virus or something causing file I/O pain?
    - dbattaglia 14y ago

edwinnathaniel 14y ago

Yes for $99 for individual developer. PLEASE.

starik36 14y ago
Same, here. I'd eat it up at $99.
rymith 14y ago
Absolutely, as we see from the numbers, most iPhone apps aren't making a lot of money, so $400 + $100 for the app store access is simply dumb for an indie dev. Miguel is a very smart man and completely clueless at the same time.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- statictype 14y ago
  Consider the possibility that a) Miguel De Icaza doesn't set the pricing on the product b) Even if he did, that indie developers who are unable to fork over the $500-$2000 for a license are not part of their target demographic. Monotouch seems to be popular enough with their existing pricing that they don't need to address anything smaller (and FWIW, their products are too expensive for me too, as much as I would love to be writing Mac/iOS apps in C#, I'm not forking over that money for it)

untog 14y ago

so as hypothetically interested as I've been in MonoTouch, etc, I've never really looked at it beyond the press releases. Try downloading the evaluation version. It allows you to test with the simulator, and at least gives you a clue as to whether you might want to spend $399 on it. Of course, if there's no chance of that ever being the case it won't be a productive use of time.

simonh 14y ago

I'd have thought something more like the old Qt license tiering would make sense - a GPL version that can only be used to develop GPL apps and a commercially licensed version if you want to sell anything.

natfriedman 14y ago
The app store does not allow GPL'd apps.
- icefox 14y ago
  And what about on the android and windows app stores?
  - brajkovic 14y ago
    Windows app store explicitly disallows open source, I believe. Android is the only one that does not.
    - Paradigma11 14y ago
      http://www.extremetech.com/computing/108551-windows-8-store-will-allow-open-source-apps-unlike-ios-and-mac http://www.extremetech.com/computing/108551-windows-8-store-...
- rymith 14y ago
  No, the GPL does not allow for further restrictions. The App Store doesn't care.
  - lambda 14y ago
    The App Store adds restrictions that are incompatible with the GPL. Who exactly "cares" is somewhat irrelevant.
- tzs 14y ago
  You can distribute your own GPL code through the App Store. You just can't include other people's GPL code. That would be enough for a useful "free for free software, pay for commercial development" model.

teyc 14y ago

As a hobbyist, you could always use MonoMac. It is still free and you may have to wrap the StoreKit APIs yourself.

lucaspiller 14y ago
+1. Xamarin.Mac just builds more on top of MonoMac. MonoMac has been used to publish apps to the App Store before: http://tirania.org/monomac/archive/2011/Jan-31.html http://tirania.org/monomac/archive/2011/Jan-31.html

jstedfast 14y ago

Just an FYI, but the MonoMac project (which is what Xamarin.Mac is based on) will be remaining as Open Source for that situation.