One of the options for interacting with the xsights platform is via web-services for use with mobile clients.  Since the iPhone is all-the-rage these days* we also  wanted an app for this platform. We outsourced the first version (time-to-market…) but we’d like to take ownership on the next versions… Which made me meet objective-C. Now I’ve picked up a lot of programming languages over the years, some where easy to grasp, some where complex, some had a flowing syntax etc. None of them, except maybe Erlang, is as ugly as objective-C is (this is just my opinion, so pardon for any of the cocoa-enthusiastics out there)

Anyway, I’ve been looking around for alternatives and I found few compelling options, most notable of these was Rhodes – a ruby based, cross platform solution. The main problem I’ve had with Rhodes, is that it uses an interpreter. The fact that they feel the need to explain why they comply with the App store rules coupled with the troubles a similar approach using Javascript gets from the app store approval process, I decided to postpone using it (and review it again in a few months).

Then I found MonoTouch (via Miguel de lcase’s blog). MonoTouch, as the post’s title says, brings .NET to iPhone developments. It includes everything you need to write C# code for the iPhone, it integrates well with the Apple tools (e.g. you can use the Interface Builder the same way you’d use xcode while developing objective-C). C#’s friendlier syntax is reason enough for me to use this platform but  it also has a nice side effect of having to write less code to get what you want (e.g. no need to for an .h file if you don’t need really need an interface, no need to release/allocate etc.)

Kudos to Novell on the effort – 

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* And rightfully so! – I’ve personally switched to an iPhone 3GS after years of using windows mobile (and its ancestors – I’ve owned different window devices ever since the philips nino was out…). This is not to say that the iPhone is perfect (it is not) but I think that today it offers the best overall experience…ButI guess, that’s a subject for another post.

 

In xsights we are doing a lot of work with mobile video, streaming and the like. We are also doing most of our development in C#. Up until recently we've had to resort to C++ (e.g. GStreamer) and sometimes Java (JMF) to handle RTP related tasks.

I've been searching for RTP stack on .NET for a long while and never found anything worthwhile. There's one implementation from Microsoft Reaseach (as part of ConferenceXP ) however the licensing for this is problematic for commercial applications.
Well, a few days ago I finally managed to locate a solution from a small company that goes by the name streamcoders. Not only do those guys offer an RTP.NET implementation it is even free to use and distribute (you can get the source code for a fee). They also have a few other components dealing with related technologies (streaming,coding, encoding).

Sure saved us a lot of trouble :)

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Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably already heard about the MS offer to acquire Yahoo. While it is Microsoft who is poised to acquire Yahoo (Microhoo) it seems that it is part of the greater move of Microsoft towards moving into Internet based service - all the "live" initiatives along with the "Software + Services" moniker.
I tend to agree with Nicholas Carr who recently published an article in the Financial Times where he talks about how Gates leaving MS marks the end of the desktop era. In fact looking for the above mentioned reference I saw another article Carr wrote for Forbes where he says it even more bluntly

"One important message is this: Software is becoming a media business. The Net is not only a universal medium, a distribution channel for words, sounds and images. It is also turning into a universal computer--the machine we use to run software and store data."

You might also want to check out  a presentation a few of my colleagues  and myself has prepared about half a year ago where we talk about the same phenomena - Called the "Future of Home Computing" (5.5Mb).


In this sense the Microsoft - Yahoo merger (if it will follow through) will result in Yahoosoft a company which is focused more on the internet aspects rather than the more traditional (some would say legacy) desktop aspects of Microsoft.

It is also interesting to note in this sense that while winning the web search (and the related ad-revenue) is something Microsoft is very interested in.  The eyes of Microsoft (and Google for that matter) are on the next battlefield - mobile search. While there are something like 305 Million broadband subscribers worldwide the number of mobile phones sold just in the last quarter of 2007 was larger (334 Millions) and the total of mobile phones worldwide is in the billions... An added bonus here is that Google is yet to take over this market (thought it of course moving in that direction with things like the android platform and location based search and services)