iOS Hello World

2012-02-23

To get accustomed to the iOS world, I've created a small Hello World app with MonoTouch today. Everything worked well so far and unexpectedly, the startup times of the iOS simulator are near zero.

To import and export data from and to this application, it needs to support Dropbox. DropNet looks good and should work with MonoTouch , too.

I am not yet completely familiar with XCode and how to buid a user interface for iOS. Not using code for creating and connecting views to controllers is kind of confusing to me. I would prefer to build user interfaces just by using a (fluent?) API and not with all this ... overhead ... . I guess code is the true natural interface of a programmer, not an user interface editor and obviously not some obscure XML format.

Note that if you are working with XCode / Interface Builder, the generated XML files are not meant to be understandable or modifiable by a human. The XML is expressed in a meta-format like <string key="NSReuseIdentifierKey">_NS:276</string>. This is very different to XAML, where you can easily understand and modify the XML code.

btw: I managed to get BlogDesk running. A nice, free blog editor for Windows. You should give it a try.