71² – The ramblings of two 30-something developers

Mono developers have shrunk their open-source implementation of the .NET runtime down to iPhone size. Novell on Monday unfurled MonoTouch, a commercial toolkit that allows developers to use Microsoft’s development framework to build apps for Apple’s ubiquitous mobile.

MonoTouch consists of a suite of compilers, libraries, and tools for integrating with the iPhone and iPod Touch SDK. It lets developers use C# and other .NET programming languages for the Apple devices, rather than wading into C and Objective-C.

We at Appstruck like reviewing iPhone apps. In fact, we love it. Getting down to the nitty gritty, laying it bare, showcasing the best and most interesting for our readers, so they don’t have to plow through deep space just to find a decent app. Really, researching applications is tedious, but great.

But, let’s not forget the genius behind the apps. After all, they don’t simply appear out of thin air. Someone had the insight, the talent, and the capacity to create these iPhone apps so that we may use them to their full power.

Wasn’t the Apple event last night supposed to be all about music? That was the impression given by the invites – ‘It’s only rock and roll but we like it’ – with speculation leading up to the event focusing on new iPods, interactive albums and the possibility of The Beatles on the iTunes Store.

Well, there was no Fab Four announcement in the end, and the biggest device news was a new iPod nano with a video camera. But the strangest thing – and most exciting from a Pocket Gamer perspective – was the high priority given to iPhone games at the event.

Apple has banned an iPhone developer responsible for over 900 apps for repeated complaints of copyright infringement. Khalid Shaikh has seen his iPhone Developer Program License Agreement and Registered iPhone Developer Agreement terminated by Apple, who told Shaikh in its rejection email that it has “informed you of numerous third party intellectual property complaints concerning over 100 of your Applications and reminded you of your obligations to obtain the necessary rights prior to submission of your Applications.

This was a problem I had early on – most of my apps required use of the camera or the photo library.

For the longest time I believed that you couldn’t test the photo library on the simulator. I was wrong, it is actually pretty easy to get pictures into the simulator for testing.

With the release of iPhone OS v3.1 expected tomorrow in coordination with the Apple “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it” event, the Dev Team has just updated their blog with a warning to all using a jail broken iPhone.

The Spotify application for the iPhone extends the usefulness of the service greatly – at the cost of a tenner a month. However the app has one show-stopping flaw: you can’t play music when the application is in the background.

This is not a hindrance shared by the iPhone or iPod Touch’s default music application – and even on the earliest iPods, you could play Blocks or check your diary while music continued to play. For some this may merely be an irritating quirk, but for others it could be a deal-breaker. The whole point of getting a top-of-the-range music player is for its versatility.

ObjectiveResource is an Objective-C port of Ruby on Rails’ ActiveResource. It provides a way to serialize objects to and from Rails’ standard RESTful web-services (via XML or JSON) and handles much of the complexity involved with invoking web-services of any language from the iPhone.

Check out this fascinating look into the design process behind the brilliant UI of “Convert”, a sleek unit converter app for the iPhone. The sheer number of different looks and designs the developers experimented with really shows how seriously they took their task. It’s a lot like the old saying – Good timber doesn’t grow with ease, the stronger the breeze, the stronger the trees.

As most of you have figured out, OpenGL ES doesn’t like textures to be non power of two, and I really didn’t want to have to force all of my textures to be powers of two before loading them into my game. This presented me with a problem that had to be solved in-code.