The Blog of Matthew Baxter-Reynolds

Credit where credit is due – I’ve had a problem with my iPad since I got it where the screen reports exteraneous “touch” signals from time-to-time – imagine typing away and the cursor flying off somewhere because the screen believes that you’ve touched on some other area of the screen.

I was imagining a nightmare fight at The Genius Bar of the Milton Keynes Apple Store, but credit to the guy who helped me – he typed on it for about 30 seconds, he saw the cursor move and ordered me a replacement straightaway. (I must say that this problem happens really quite rarely – once or twice in a heavy-usage day, so this was lucky.)

Really good!

I’m delighted to be able to say that I’ve been invited to participate in the MonoDroid private preview programme, and I must say it is looking totally and completely awesome. It’s really going to shake things up.

For those who don’t know, I have a new book project with Apress. Multimobile Development: Building Applications for any Smartphone is a book that takes you through how to build the *same* application for iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry. The purpose is to create a reference guide where if you know how to do something on Platform A, you can find out easily how to do it on Platform B. (Some people who are wondering about moving from Windows Mobile 6.x to a platform other than Windows Phone may find this book particularly helpful.)

I have setup an separate site for the book, which you can find at http://www.multimobiledevelopment.com/. The book shows you how to build an application that connects to a service hosted on that server, so on that site you’ll find references to the service, and links through to Google Code that’s hosting the code used in the book. (The code for the book is published under the MPL.) Over time there will be sample chapters and other free stuff. Apress are also offering the book through their Alpha Program which gives early access to the content as it works through their sausage machine and becomes a real book. If you subscribe to the RSS feed on that site you can keep up-to-date with progress and news.

Mr Fitchett (http://twitter.com/MattFitchett) points out a change in the iPhone 4.0 SDK that bars use of third-party framework layers. The Register has an article on it – iPhone 4.0 SDK bars un-Jobsian code translation. The pertinent bit seems to be this:

“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)”

So we already knew there was no Java on iPhone (my view on this is that it makes apps run too slowly and stops the experience fromm using an iPhone from being as gorgeously fast and slick as it is), but does this have an impact on using something like MonoTouch or other iPhone application frameworks?