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Few days back i was pretty much sure that Titanium is a great IDE for developing iOS apps but in last few days i have gone through few articles about Titanium and some of these articles pointed that Titanium is not fully featured for iOS development and it is buggy as well.
SO i came here to my StackOverflow friends to know is it true? does someone really faced any problem or encountered any bug while developing an iOS app using Titanium.
Please Advise about should i use it or should i go for Objective-C?
Thanks.
I believe Titanium is probably more buggy than native Cocoa Touch libraries and is, by definition, not fully featured as native Objective-C development.
The main question before you choose your development way is: will you in future ever consider to port your iOS application to Android? If the answer is 'yeah!' and you don't know Java, but you are more familiar with web technologies like CSS, Javascript and HTML/HTML5 rather than C/C++/Objective-C, I think the natural choice should be Titanium.
On other hand, if you're quick in learning new languages and have some good experience with C/C++, Objective-C is the way - later on you probably can quickly learn Java and jump into Android platform.
Second criteria is: is Titanium capable of delivering UI/UX you'd like to have in your apps? Titanium successful stories can help you answer that question - Titanium: Applications Showcase. Also try many native apps check what they offer. Compare and make decisions.
Important: I've never tried Titanium myself. I just face the similar dilemma as you. I want to extend my mobile app dev skills into Android world and consider Titanium as one of ways to go (I know basic JavaScript/CSS/HTML5, but not Java).
EDIT: I've just checked out your profile and it seems you're coming from Android world. I'd add to my answer: if learning Java was easy for you and you're already familiar with ups&downs of Java development for Android, learning Objective-C should be easy. The main difference is that in iOS you have to manage memory yourself and it can be a little painful.
Some good stuff:
1. Memory Management Programming Guide
2. Learning Objective-C: A Primer
3. The Objective-C Programming Language
Titanium basically uses JavaScript for developing application in iOS and Android. If you are comfortable working in JavaScript and CSS you can try Titanium.
Its my personal opinion, try learning Objective C, its really great language. If you have knowledge of C or C++, then understanding the concepts of Objective C becomes easier.
Try Objective C, you won't be disappointed.
I'm using Titanium (and have been playing with it for a few months) and can say with definitive emphasis that it's buggy as hell. :-) If you're looking for a single-platform solution, ie only Android or iOS, and plan on only supporting that single platform, it's a no-brainer to avoid TiStudio.
What Titanium is trying to do is to abstract and simplify the underlying nature of the platform you're on. It doesn't do this fabulously, but for simple apps, I've had lots of success.
That said, because it's attention is split amongst three (with Blackberry support incoming) platforms, it will always lag behind the native dev systems, and always lack in advanced features. That's the trade-off.
All that said, TiStudio is lightyears better than TiDeveloper (Appcelerator bought Aptana and is now in the process of integrating Titanium development with the Aptana IDE), and they're really working hard to make the platform top-notch.
I've landed on it as a platform due to my abject hatred of Java (after two months trying to relearn Java using the native IDE path) and my desire to do cross-platform development. I'm also confident I can route around the Titanium bugs/flaws as I'm basically writing my own app development framework on top of the Titanium SDK, so I can automate things that suck, fix errant behaviors, etc. It's a lot of work.
But that's basically where mobile development is right now. You pick your poison. Stick with a native SDK and be locked into one platform and have to deal with an annoying language (both Java and Objective C are ancient by modern Python/Ruby/whatever standards), or try something like Titanium which offers simplicity and a more flexible language, but is less tightly integrated an more buggy.
Best of luck!
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I want to build a mobile/tablet application whose core feature will be taking pictures with the camera , viewing pictures and receiving notifications. Also I want to target iphone, ipad and android platforms.
Titanium appcelerator piqued my interest because of its cross platform appeal. However I am concerned because I've read mixed reviews on SO and other sites. The things that worry me are:
Subpar android support
Camera support not fully capable (e.g ios 4.1 HDR capability)
Camera support buggy
The nightmare scenario for me would be to invest time in titanium only to discover later on that its a major PITA and drop it and go "native"
Please share your thoughts and experiences.
I chose Titanium for a serious application, although one that does not use the camera. I think there are a variety of things that could play into your decision...
If your app intends to do "fancy" stuff with the camera, or some real heavy image processing and so on, you're likely better off going native. If on the other hand, you just want to have it take pictures, and then those will be used as-is, or sent to a server, or what not, then Titanium should work just fine. Titanium does have some processing and image manipulation things, but as others have said, if you really want to take advantage of the device's hardware, you probably want to go full native.
It should also be noted, and Appcelerator says this as well, that with a Titanium app, you won't just write a single app that works as-is on all devices. You will need to taylor the UI to each device (or class of device, i.e. iPhone, Android), because they have different UI's, and different standard UI flows and so on.
But, one of the potential advantages to Titanium is if you don't know Objective-C and/or Java, and you do know JavaScript (and in my case, I'm actually using Coffeescript :). Or, if you would enjoy your work much more writing JS than ObjC/Java. This was one of the main reasons for me. I have done some ObjC dev in the past, and don't even mind it, but this project I'm doing is on a very very aggressive schedule, and it was just going to be far more effective for me to use Titanium. I was able to get set up and build an app extremely quickly, and I am not spending any time having to become more deeply familiar with the programming language I'm using, memory management bits (you can't fully ignore this with Titanium, but essentially they're doing it for you). Based on the folks I've talked to, and how much time they spend with memory management, Interface Builder issues (this is mostly the ease of forgetting to setup connections or hook various things up, IB is actually a pretty great tool), and so on, I'm quite glad I'm using Titanium.
While I expect to do an Android version at some point, it's not a priority. But, I'm glad to know that a large chunk of my app code will be re-usable, tested, etc. and that I'll wind up mostly just building/revamping the UI for Android, not rewriting networking code, data management, and so on. Android support will be much better (supposedly) in Titanium 1.5, but you may want to wait for that release to evaluate Android if that's a priority.
Finally, Titanium does have a "module" system, that allows you to wrap native code, exposing it as a JavaScript interface in Titanium. We are about to leverage this to integrate a third party library, and at least for what we need, it looks very easy to use, and has given me a little more confidence that if some particular native feature we need access to comes up, that we'd have a decent chance of integrating that while still using Titanium, but I think it would depend on what the particular native functionality was.
Good luck and enjoy building a mobile app, it's pretty fun!
We have been using Titanium in one of our projects for around 2 months, and frankly speaking our experience with Titanium is too bad.
As per my opinion, below are some major drawbacks of Titanium:
1) First thing is you will not get debugging support at all (We can understand how debugging require in any of the project and in any of the technologies).
2) Titanium is NOT fully supporting all the features of Android/iPhone; beyond some level it will not give you support.
3) Comparing with Android/iPhone SDK, developers will get very less amount of help from the internet and API library (Titanium provides the API library help file).
These are the general issues that end developers face while dealing with Titanium and I suppose sometimes it will be tedious and frustrating work for them.
If the functionality of your application is somewhat like displaying data from the web (like many news, media type apps) then Titanium is the suitable option; otherwise not.
The Android support is not near as good as it is for the iPhone. If you were to just say iPhone I would say you would have luck using Titanium. However, I think trying to build one code base in Appcelerator and also use in your Android environment may not be the best experience.
That said, IMO doing Android / Java code is much easier than doing Objective C / iPhone work.
So worst case I would consider using Titanium for your iPhone version & do Android in Java.
You can give it a shot doing them both in Titanium, but worst case code the Java version.
I just hate objective C and the 'native' Apple development environment so much.
I would recommend against using a cross-platform toolkit when interacting with device hardware is one of the key requirements of your application. I haven't worked with Titanium before, but I find it hard to believe that they will give you the same level of hardware access that you get with native frameworks.
In particular, iOS 4.0 added a mess of new capabilities regarding the camera, including live video frame processing through AVFoundation, and I find it hard to believe that a third-party framework will keep up as these platforms advance. To be honest, it's pretty easy to write an application that interacts with the camera on the iPhone nowadays (count the number of them on the App Store as an indicator of this). I wrote a live camera frame processing application in about six hours the other day.
I can't speak for Android, but I imagine dealing with cameras is fairly trivial using the native APIs there as well.
You're also going to find performance testing and debugging your application to be far easier using the native tools than those supplied through a third party. In particular, Apple's Instruments is an extremely powerful, yet easy to work with, application for tracking down CPU and memory issues within your application.
There's also the community aspect. You'll find far, far more people working on Android and Cocoa Touch than on Titanium (just look at the numbers of questions in the various tags on Stack Overflow to see that). This means many more tutorials and a whole lot more sample code that you can use.
The time you'll spend getting your iPhone and Android build environments set up, and submitting to both stores, will be the same no matter if you go with a native environment or with Titanium.
In the end, even with learning both platforms, I think you'll come out ahead by avoiding a cross-platform solution. Trust me, I've tried to do cross-platform development before for other projects and ended up with lowest-common-denominator products that took much longer to write.
I've developed an Appcelerator-based camera application and was very pleased with it. I think some of the negative reviews come from the fact that it's a bit hard to get set up (more due to Apple's crazy developer registration process).
Once I got started, it was easy to do things like overlays on top of the camera screen. I was really expecting difficulty with that part, but it worked well.
I have spoken with the Appcelerator team in the past, and they are a great group to work with. I've seen them be responsive to other user issues, and I'd trust that if I ran across a real bug, they would address it quickly.
A little late, but my two cents...
I honestly believe you can very quickly prototype an application with Titanium Appcelerator and focus on the critical feature sets to determine if it is the appropriate tool for you.
All developers have there opinions and experience(s) which influence there comments; developers have different ways of learning and different levels of productivity... In the end, it comes down to how are you most productive with the tools available to you.
Since you are stating from the start that you want to deliver a solution an multiple platforms, I think it would be a poor decision on your part to not even spend a week or two investigating cross-platform frameworks and then making the decision based on your personal experience.
There is Titanium Appcelerator and there is also PhoneGap, where PhoneGap might help you is that there is the ability to extend/enhance the underlying framework through writing plugins (I wrote one for iphone ) and there is an android one on my blog also... this can fill missing gaps for you when you move across platforms.
Also since the UI in a phone gap solution is HTML5 Webkit based, it can give you a consistent look and feel across you devices if you like. Frameworks like jQTouch and JQuery Mobile are being used for UX with PhoneGap Application
I reviewed negative feedback for Titanium Appcelerator but I tottaly agree with Aaron Saunders that if you use PhongeGap Development is support HTML5 which can getting easy to make apps for iPhone, iPad and Android mobile.
Has anyone highlighted the cost off titanium.
I was contacted by them today and if you are more than a one man band you have to sign up for a partnership program else you are held liable for breech of contract if you release the app.
The partnership program is £5000 which is far to much for us as a start up company when it's our first application, we are currently looking for a different option now.
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A recent post by John Gruber notes that the following legalese:
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.
Has been revised as follows:
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
And makes the following observation:
My reading of this new language is that cross-compilers, such as the Flash-to-iPhone compiler in Adobe’s upcoming Flash Professional CS5 release, are prohibited. This also bans apps compiled using MonoTouch — a tool that compiles C# and .NET apps to the iPhone.
Does this in fact ban the use of Monotouch for the IPhone?
Update -
This changed recently. MonoTouch should no longer conflict with
the agreement. Any statements below are purely historical!
Yes, it seems pretty clear from their license agreement now that if the original application is written in C# then it would be violating the license:
...Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine...
They even hammer it in a little further:
Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited
Kind of a bummer, MonoTouch and the Flash CS5 -> iPhone converter are very cool.
Update:
Apple has dropped (almost) all technical requirements for languages and libraries for iOS, so MonoTouch is without a doubt a viable solution. See Apple's announcement.
Most people here simply want to take Apple's document by the word and say "yes, its banned". Well, here's my point of view: at this point, nobody really has any idea if MonoTouch is going to be banned or not, and I'll explain why:
The Apple agreement version 3 (not the latest, the one before) clearly states that its illegal to use any other frameworks to develop applications other than the ones provided by Apple:
3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including
without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise.
No interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run
by Apple's Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s). http://adcdownload.apple.com/iphone/iphone_sdk_3.2__final/iphone_sdk_agreement.pdf
Even though that's the case (and was actually the case since 2.x, apple doesn't have any problem accepting applications that do exactly that. For example, ALL EA games use Lua scripts, and lots and lots of people use external libraries that are not native to the iPhone. Even when the iPhone has those native APIs, Apple never had a problem accepting applications with different versions of it, like SQLite.
My point is that saying "YES, they'll be banned" right now is simply WAAY too early. The only clear thing at this point is that Apple could in fact use that to ban apps. Just like they accept Apps today that are against some of their rules, they'll probably continuing doing so.
There's also the fact that are hundreds (or probably a few thousands?) of apps in the store currently running Mono, and Apple will need to accept updates for those apps. Major apps with millions of sales were created using Mono (and Lua), and I doubt they would refund every single user.
Lastly, Enterprise applications are deployed to iPhones without Apple's approval, and that's a big market that MonoTouch is on (I myself develop enterprise apps). There's no way at this point that Apple could ban MonoTouch for those applications, and that will probably be enough to keep MonoTouch alive for a long time.
Update:
New changes to sections 3.3.1, 3.3.2 and 3.3.9 have made MonoTouch (and all other cross compilers/languages/etc) perfectly acceptable on the iPhone. See Apple's announcement
Miguel doesn't seem to think so. See the tweet and Miguel's response. Lets not overreact here and say that Monotouch is dead, or stop developing with Monotouch until some clarifications have been made by all parties involved.
That said I would definitely start putting the heat on Apple for such draconian development policies. Things like this, and the nebulous process that is the approval policy of iphone/ipad/touch apps should strike fear into the hearts of developers. What's next, their license stating that the only Ad platform you are allowed to use is iAd? Not allowing the distribution of free apps without iAd? Slowly raising Apple's share of the revenue of app sales? As developers in a locked down eco-system, we are kind of frogs in a pot of hot water, and Apple is slowly turning up the heat. Now is the time to explore other mobile platforms, because as they get better, the main thing holding people to the Apple platform is lack of applications on other platforms.
I spent months of evenings working on ideas for a killer iPhone app in Objective C. My day job is C#. I downloaded MonoTouch C# when it became a viable alternative and have just spent 3 months converting my code to iPhone specific MonoTouch C#. Which stopped me going mad through switching from C#/Objective C.
What do I do now throw it all away and start again or give up!?!
I feel really sorry for the Mono guys. This is plain wrong. It is one thing to stop Adobe who haven't launched their product and have no customers and to stop MonoTouch who do and also have approved product in the AppStore.
Why would anyone want to build a business and invest in Apple when they will take it all away at a moments notice without being answerable or questionable?
Clearly developers and customers of Apple caring for them and their products is a one way street.
I hope Apple gets trounced for this ridiculous policy. Arrogance is not attractive and generally bad for business. This is one of the reasons I haven't started iPhone development.
Most hardware and OS providers are happy to have additional tools and audience to write to their platform. Apple is taking the stance that its (braindead) tools are the only game in town.
The "Big Brother" ad from 1984 is more and more relevant...
EDIT
The way it is written also seems to imply that if I wrote a .net to objective C/apple translator that the code isn't acceptable because the original code was not objective c. That is ludicrous (and unenforceable.)
Unity is also based on Mono and with that being a sizable commercial product I imagine that this is an issue which we've not heard the end of yet.
Banning all apps that are not written in Obj-C/C++ would, in theory ban all Unity games also, of which there are a large number already in the app store.
This question has also been asked over on the Unity Answers site, and their official answer is:
"We just heard about the iPhone OS4.0
and the new Terms-Of-Service. While we
believe we are fully compliant with
these we are right now doing all we
can to get this verified by Apple. As
soon as we know precisely, we will of
course share that info with everybody.
Please hang tight while we get this
sussed out."
Be interesting to see what they get told by Apple.
The thing is, surely saying that an app has to be written in a certain language is a bit of a misnomer, as once the app is compiled down, it's always a native binary regardless how it's been built. My guess is that all they can look for is some kind of signature in the binary to detect what tool it was built with. A flawed approach.
EDIT: There is an interesting overview of the situation on this blog: monotouch now dead in the water what does apples new iphone developer agreement mean
The new license agreement is explicitly clear about that. So YES, it will be banned.
Advice, if you want to really develop for iPhone, try XCode. If you are already familiar with Java or C# or yet better C++, then learning Objective-C wont be that hard.
iPhone/iPad is Apples new successful business, and they will do anything to keep this business growing, maybe they will not ban Monotouch apps now, but who knows there next move? So if you are really really interested in iPhone dev, instead of having nightmares that your work might be just rejected. Just switch to XCode, at least that will lower your app reject percentage. Hence, my advice.
I think something to strongly consider is Apple's motivation.
I agree with other sentiments posted online that Apple is trying to prevent commoditization of applications - that is to say, having more and more applications written using frameworks that generate applications that can run across multiple devices.
But that's not what Monotouch is. Monotouch is all about using the Apple frameworks to write applications - but through Mono, not Objective-C. So from that standpoint what Monotouch is doing is not something that should really bother Apple.
I still hold that developers are better off writing in the native language of the platform they are using, as things are just generally smoother when you don't introduce system that can have abstraction impedance mismatch - the Cocoa frameworks were all built to be used from Objective-C, and they make the most sense when you are used to the philosophy of Objective-C. But I do hope that Apple comes down on the side of allowing MonoTouch to be used.
All Apple is saying is that you must all now use 1980's languages to develop your competition beating state of the art Mobile Applications....
Makes perfect sense. Sounds like a winning strategy to me.
It also stops you from using any 3rd party libraries that you can't guarantee that have been developed in straight C, C++ or Objective C.
So basically it means that you can't buy in Games API's such as Unity.
Just adding my 2 cents. It seems that after reading this part: (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited) there is nothing to discuss. They have expressed them unambiguously. Not only they are banning MonoTouch and Unity3d, it seems they are also banning Titanium Framework. However, after reading this article, i found myself really confused.
I am not familiar with US laws, but is it legal? I mean, aren't they breaking some anti-monopoly laws?
Besides all of this, i can't understand their motivation. Not only will they partly lose a developers interest, they will also lose a developers respect, i think.
As of today, Section 3.3.1 of the Apple iOS Developer Program License has now been reverted to the old text:
3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner
prescribed by Apple and must not use
or call any private APIs.
Apple has released an official statement on the license changes.
This would indicate that it is now permissible to use MonoTouch.
One goal of the Mono team is porting Silverlight to the iPhone by mean of MonoTouch/Moonlight for cross platform development. That's a bit like porting Flash to the iPhone. There is also Monodroid on the way to help us porting applications and, you know, Apple runs amonk every time someone says "Android" :-) IMHO, if Apple is targeting Adobe with the new agreement, they are targeting Novel too. We are probably speculating and there's a NDA but many of us invested a lot of time on this platform so we need to make the situation clear. We cannot wait next summer to discuss this matter. For example, I've been asked by a friend to help his company to prototype a MonoTouch application for a customer. Does the new agreement only affect the App Store distribution? What about in-house distribution?
This google docs spreadsheet has a long list of apps that will be affected by the new agreement. Some noteable ones that have been #1 in the appstore for their category:
Monopoly
Lemonade Tycoon
Skee ball
The settlers
Zombieville
One of the funny inclusions is Toy Story.
oMany apps have been accepted within the last few days written with the help of monotouch and unity, whereas I also am using it as well as obj-c, since the announcement and change in the agreement, so GO FIGURE,...the good ol'WTF comes to mind. It is a bipolar piggybank it seems.
ALSO, the last Unity Game GiantMOTO, which is under HOT NEW GAMES - YESTERDAY, has on its splash screen onLoad in big letters, POWERED BY UNITY. So, all the conjecture, assumptions, etc. is really out the door. It might say all that in the new version, it is certainly NOT enforced. And montouch is the only development platf that FULLY exposes iPhone API and builds COMPLETELY into obj-c using XCode.
From what the license agreement says MonoTouch apps will clearly not be allowed in the AppStore.
The more interesting question is though, against which framework / apps will they enforce it? They will also have to write automated tests to check if the apps were written natively or not, because the people who approve the apps won't have the time / skills to do it for every single app. These apps won't put a sticker there 'Using MonoTouch / Flash'.
Short answer to all that blob in the agreement is YES.
Apple is basically shooting itself in the foot by limiting programs to a few languages:
C - which is not really suited for application development these days, due to it's low-level nature. It's mostly a systems programming language today.
C++ - which makes it harder to shoot your phone, but when it happens, it's with a bazooka. Apart from Qt, there aren't any complete application frameworks to use in C++ (and Qt doesn't support iPhone - yet).
Objective-C - which was invented by Apple and of course will be supported.
JavaScript running in WebKit - basically a web application.
They are deliberately limiting what tools you can use to develop for iPhone, which will almost certainly get them in serious trouble. I'm sure a good sized chunk of the community will just quit iPhone development and migrate to a different platform like Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android or Maemo, which are totally open - you are free to write your application in LOLCODE.
Apart from possibly making iPhone junk for developers, it also gives Adobe a nice kiss:
Apple deliberately blocks Flash from iPad, and now they are also blocking it from iPhone. The nummer is Adobe Flash's CS5 biggest feature is deploying Flash applications to iPhone.
tl;dr: Apple is basically shooting itself in the foot with this move.
It's now months after the flash debacle and it's pretty obvious Monotouch and Unity are doing just fine.
As per "Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited"
Monotouch compiles code down to a native binary, there is no "layer". They're referring to somethign like a .NET runtime, Java JVM or Flash runtime.
Mono applications would normally compile to bytecode which is and would require JIT (just in time) compilation to run them thus a .Net framework or Mono framework is required. However, in the case of iOS and Android, Mono application compile to native code. Therefore, in the eyes of Apple, there is no third layer, Apple will never ban Mono. So you can feel free to develop with MonoTouch and distribute your apps. To ensure you further, there are various of Mono applications (including games and applications) on the AppStore that have been around for a long time.
I'm new to IPhone development and have to decide on a suitable tool to develop my application in. Since I am know C# / .NET, but not objective C, Mono Touch seems appealing to me. But is it is worth spending the extra $400?
If have tried both, I'd be interested in your opinion.
I just posted about this at www.zouak.com, but in short for me it was a case of divide and conquer. I have years of .NET experience and honestly found learning Objective-C frustrating. Having a new language plus a new set of tools reduced my productivity significantly, also having to deal with manual memory management after years of not (prior to 2001 when I started with .NET I was a Java guy since its inception, so it's been a while) was an extra layer of "been there, don't want to go back."
I've found the MonoTouch toolkit to be very worthwhile, and while I understand some of the objections and concerns, I'm someone for whom leveraging what I know (C#) allowed me to focus on what I didn't know (Interface Builder, the API, etc.). At this point now that I've built up a significant amount of familiarity with the Apple tools I'm nearing a point where if I wanted I could look at taking on Objective-C as a new language, given that I am a lot more comfortable, but for me learning a new language isn't as rewarding an accomplishment for me at this point in my career compared with learning a platform and getting quality applications out the door is. For other folks I know they enjoy delivering "as Apple intended", and I fully respect that. Also, if Apple had a Java toolkit, I would be all over that. But the conceptual distance between C# and Objective-C is more than I'm willing to invest at this point.
That's my 2 cents,
Driss.
Great podcast on this week's dotnetrocks about this.
One HUGE factor that would sway me is the fact that they are currently working on Monodroid and I guess that WinMo 7 will probably be supported through some moonlight magic.
Imagine targetting the top 3 mobile platforms with one language? Sweet....
I've been using MonoTouch for 5 months, and really like it.
Take a look at my answer to a similar question here: MonoTouch - has anyone used this?
I am an iPhone developer, I have tried mono touch, but for me I would say NO, it's not worth the extra 400.
First of all several free frameworks exist that allow you to target multiple platforms at once using different (usually high level) languages, such as PhoneGap, there's even a Flex framework somewhere, without counting Unity3D which actually uses C# and even allows you to deploy on iPhone and Nintendo Wii.
Some of the Cons of using this third party frameworks are:
1- Extra software layer, which obviously increases the possibility of failure. Last year it happened with Unity3D. Somehow the applications developed with it started being rejected by Apple (official Unity announcement here) , Unity guys responded fast, and I think they fixed the issue with Apple in 3 days. But what if 3 days is too much for you, or even worse, what if the external framework that you are using to develop doesn't have that quality of support and the 3 days end up being weeks?... what if your applications got broken with an OS update ?
2- You totally loose Xcode debugging chances (loose the symbols), and you are kinda reduced to printf debug. Of course you can debug in the Mono IDE, but still, Xcode is a powerful beast and all the SDK Betas are delivered to the developers to be used with particular Xcode versions.
3- Binary size tends to be bigger in comparison to native Objective-C applications. ( 6 to 7Mb larger in average ), and remember that if your application is above 20 Mb it can't be downloaded from an iPhone using 3G or Edge, ( which is the most popular way to install apps ). So if that matters to you, it's another issue.
In conclusion:
If you want to use MonoTouch because you don't know Objective-C, go for it, but still I would really recommend you to take a bit of time to learn the Objective-C language and the official Apple API's. Here's a great point of view about this.
I would say no, because the biggest thing to learn about the iPhone SDK is not Objective-C, but the APIs instead. Even if you used Mono Touch, you would have to learn the API for the iPhone.
It never hurts to learn a new programming language.
(However, don't listen to me, because I am using Lua to write my iPhone applications...)
As a .NET developer, I always dreamed for the possibility to develop with my existing skills (C#) applications for the iPhone.
Both programs require a Mac and the iPhone SDK installed.
Appcelerator Titanium was the first app I tried, and it is based on exposing some iPhone native api to javascript so that they can be called using that language.
Monotouch starts at $399 for being able to deploy on the iPhone and not on the iPhone simulator while Titanium is free.
Monotouch (Monodevelop) has an IDE that is currently missing in Titanium (but you can use any editor like Textmate, Aptana...)
I think both program generate at the end a native precompiled app (also if I am not sure about the size of the final app on the iPhone as I think the .NET framework calls are prelilnked at compilation time in Monotouch).
I am also not sure about the full coverage of all the iPhone API and features.
Titanium has also the advantage to enable Android app development but as a C# developer I still find Monotouch experience more like the Visual Studio one.
Which one would you choose and what are your experiences on Monotouch and Titanium?
Like any which-tool-or-platform-or-language-or-framework-or-whatever question, it should really come down to what you want.
Forget all the if-you-want-to-develop-for-this-platform-then-you-have-to-pay-your-dues advice. If you're interested in learning Objective-C, Xcode, and associated Apple bits, then go for it. I did. It's been fun, but my interest was in developing iPhone apps. Learning a new language, framework, and IDE was just a bonus (I like this stuff). It was also necessary when I started.
I've been working with MonoTouch since it was released, and I love it. I prefer C# to Objective-C, and I like having access to the subset of the .Net (Mono) framework that MonoTouch provides. There are certain things that are simply easier to do with .Net than Cocoa (string manipulation, date manipulation, anything XML, etc.).
I also like not having to deal with reference-counting anymore. I was spoiled by years of not having to keep track of resources at that level. I don't mind having to clean up after myself, but I don't want to have to manually do something that every other modern dev platform I've used does for me automatically. Plus, even for seasoned Objective-C devs, reference-counting isn't a no-brainer. Scroll through OS X's console output sometime to see how many apps crash due to memory-management issues (I know - this can happen with basically any app, but it's far easier to make the mistakes that lead to this situation when you get overworked devs involved whose attention spans have been destroyed by twelve hours of if this and if that and else this and else that and blah blah blah).
I still use Objective-C/Xcode - I've really learned to like Apple's tools. I honestly feel they're awkward and a bit arcane, but still fun.
But... then I also like this:
public string SomeString { get; set; }
To do the same thing with Objective-C (on the iPhone, anyway) requires that you declare a local variable to back the property, write the property declaration, and then use the "synthesize" directive to have the property generated for you (depending on what property attributes you specify, you might have a property that wraps getters and setters that take care of reference-counting for you - overall, this is a time-saver, but the C# Way is the clear winner here).
That's just one example of how MonoTouch can make your life easier, especially if you're used to .Net/Java/Python/other languages that don't require that you get your fingers dirty with memory-mangement (unless you want to).
As far as iPhone-ness is concerned, aside from brining part of .Net to the iPhone world, the MonoTouch namespace maps to CocoaTouch, so if you're confused about, say, the MonoTouch UIViewController, you can just hop over to Apple's docs on the UIViewController. MonoTouch .Net-izes CocoaTouch, but it's close enough that you're unlikely to hit a wall (that wouldn't have also hit if you were using Xcode/Objective-C). It's slick.
Titanium is different. Since they're trying (trying) to create an abstraction layer that lets you write the same app for multiple platforms, you're going to deal with the usual drawbacks: Totally different APIs, loss of flexibility (the same could be said of MonoTouch, but not remotely to the same degree), and basically having to learn a whole new platform (which is what you're trying to avoid by getting around Xcode/Objective-C/CocoaTouch, right?).
I also hate JavaScript, so I'm going to be biased against Titanium. But even if that weren't the case - even if I could use a language I do like - the APIs don't tickle my fancy. Or my anything.
Regardless of the dev tools you choose, you will end up having to learn something about CocoaTouch. Whether it's Xcode/Objective-C, MonoTouch, or Titanium, something is going to break or go all wonky on you, and you're eventually going to have to refer to CocoaTouch documentation.
If I were giving a talk on iPhone development (which I have, and which I will be doing again), and if I were to discuss alternatives to Apple's dev tools (which I will), I would still strongly encourage devs to at least work through a few basic iPhone apps using the native tools. It's going to make you a better developer for the platform - period. And you can use this beginning phase to determine if you even want to use anything other than the free Apple-supplied bits. You might not. I've been using MonoTouch because it pleases me - not because it's necessary.
So, to summarize a few basic criteria:
Preference (language/frameworks)
Devices (do you care about non-iPhone platforms or think you might someday?)
Comfort (if you like and know C# MUCH better than Objective-C, there's no reason not to go with MonoTouch)
And don't listen to the naysayers unless they've actually used the tech they're talking about. For example, I've read about Titanium, but I'm not experienced with it - I just know that I don't want anything to do with it on account of my preferences. That doesn't make it "bad" - just something I don't want in my life.
The Objective-C crowd can be impressively zealous. While there are plenty of open-minded devs in it, there are so, so, so many who think Objective-C and Cocoa and blah blah blah are THE last dev tools devkind will ever need.
Ignore them.
If you're worried about support, here's some stuff to consider:
Apple is likely to remain current, as they're the ones making this junk.
MonoTouch is likely to remain current - the Mono peeps have done an amazing job keep up with Microsoft, and I see no reason why they won't do the same with Apple. I'm blown away by what they do. And despite MonoTouch having been released, like, five minutes ago, they already have an update out for iPhone 3.1 stuff. They're serious about this, and I think they're magic. They're the Keebler Elves of the dev world. They sit in their secret layers and crank out stuff everybody (ok - not everybody) likes, but that nobody else would even attempt to do.
Titanium is either going to become an awkward unified API for writing apps for multiple platforms that is entirely its own thing, or it's going to become more and more splintered as the capabilities of different platforms diverge. Yeah, that's a bunch of typical armchair nerdly future-gazing... I should have prefaced this bullet item with "It's my opinion that..." If only there were a way to go back and change it.
Go with what you like. MonoTouch is a "safe" alternative to Apple's stuff. I'm afraid Titanium is going to go down the same old oops-this-super-high-level-platform-abstraction-layer-stuff-doesn't-really-work road that so many other technologies have. But if you're doing something simple, there's no harm in giving it a shot, especially considering that it's free during the beta period.
These are fun and interesting ways you can build iPhone apps. But, for truly rapid native iPhone development, your best bet is the free iPhone SDK and Xcode.
To be honest, the hardest things to learn are the capabilities of the frameworks themselves, NOT the language syntax. But that is an issue you have to tackle either way as these IDEs/Languages still require you to grasp some of the conventions of Cocoa (and Cocoa Touch).
I don't say this as a Cocoa / Objective-C snob, but if you know C (which as a C# dev you do) there really isn't any barrier to entry.
In addition, you will have access to tons of tutorials and sample code that just won't be available for these fledgling translators/IDEs/languages.
Learning another programming language is rarely a bad thing, and as an experienced programmer, your time investment won't be as large as you think.
I've created an open source project http://propertycross.com that helps developers select a cross-platform mobile framework by showing the same application implemented with Sencha, Titanium, Xamarin and more. This project allows you to easily compare a wide range of frameworks in terms of end-user experience, code, IDE, developer experience etc ...
I kinda like the idea of providing means to quickly get a grip on iPhone dev with techno people already know.
I personnaly, as a Java developer, use iSPectrum (http://www.flexycore.com). It also come with an IDE, debugger and stuff, which make it really convenient to develop with because it benefits of all the power of Eclipse Java plugin.
Being based on Java, this also allows to easily reuse already existing code from other java apps, which can be really handy providing that Java is present on almost all platforms (desktop & mobile alike) except iPhone.
Plus it's free for open source projects.
I'd rather consider these kind of solutions, because I don't like the idea of coming back to developing in emacs :) .
I know this is an old topic, but in the interest of staying current, it looks like MonoTouch and other cross-platform frameworks are going to be banned in SDK 4.0. Your only "safe" bet for writing iPhone apps is to use XCode and Objective-C, at least for the time being.
If you're C# programmer why you shouldn't invest some times to learn Objective C. Honestly speaking, it will not take much time from you. But you feels good to work in a new platform with new language. Learning new things all time fascinates me.
There are numerous ways to get on the device. Apple has stated in the SDK license that the only approved way to get on the device is via C, C++, ObjectiveC, and Javascript.
It appears at this point in time that apps built on MonoTouch and Appcelerator Titanium are being accepted into the App Store. Thanks to the license change, there is much fear, uncertainty and doubt on this subject. Apple has scared everyone not doing ObjectiveC.
I would suggest that you do whatever makes the most sense for you as a developer. If you know C# and .NET, you should go with MonoTouch. If you know ObjectiveC or the Mac platform, ObjectiveC is probably the way to go. If you know X and it's on the iPhone, well, X is where I would suggest looking first.