Mike Lee and Brian LeRoux discuss how patents affect app developers and approaches to keep away patent trolls. Also: when to choose native GUIs over web GUIs for mobile apps - and when not.
An ongoing problem with specialized platforms is the lack of support for unit testing. Developers are forced to compromise the quality of their tests or their build process in order to get anything working. Recently MonoTouch has made progress in this area, but Windows Phone and Mono for Android still lag behind.
MonoTouch.Dialog is a UI development toolkit designed to dramatically reduce the amount of boilerplate code needed to create application screens for the iPhone and iPad. Through the creative use of attributes, screens are dynamically built from class definitions. Alternately they can be programmatically created or loaded from a JSON document.
Xamarin, purveyors of C# compilers for Android and iOS, is looking to make mobile device code more portable by standardizing the way hardware is accessed. Their new abstraction layer, Xamarin.Mobile, allows the same code for contact, geolocation, and notifications to be used across each type of device.
JetBrains has released AppCode 1.0, their first release of an Objective-C IDE. It requires Mac OSX 10.5 or above. It requires the Apple Developer Tools to be installed (in order to access the simulator and developer headers) but provides more advanced refactoring and code smell detection. AppCode has a free 30-day trial, and discounted licenses until December 31st.
Sync Framework Toolkit builds on the Sync Framework 2.1 and uses OData to sync with any platform or client, including Windows Phone 7, Silverlight, Windows Mobile, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android devices, and any browser using HTML5.
We recently interviewed Scott Olson of the MonoCross Project. The MonoCross Project is a framework for cross-platform mobile development. It uses a combination of .NET and Mono technologies.
In an attempt to address the platform divergence problem in the .NET/Mono ecosystem, Microsoft is working on an extension called Portable Library Tools. This tool allows the same compiled library to run on .NET 4.0, Silverlight, Xbox 360, and Windows Phone 7 are available. Microsoft is working with Mono to add support for MonoTouch and MonoDroid.
In this IEEE article, author Charlie Miller talks about the mobile security vulnerabilities. He explains how smart phones are becoming targets of attackers and discusses security models of two smart phone operating systems: Apple's iOS and Google's Android. The attackers can get remote code to run on a mobile device in two ways: mobile malware and drive-by downloads.
Wallace B. McClure is the co-author of Professional iPhone Programming with MonoTouch and .NET/C# and the soon to be released Professional Android Programming with Mono for Android and .NET/C#. Our interview took place took place prior to and just following the announcement that Xamarin would be taking over maintenance of Mono from Attachmate.
Adam Blum discusses the future of smartphones: sensors, languages, and programming paradigms. Also: what's new in Rhodes 2.0, the cross platform smartphone Ruby app framework.
