ChrisNTR

For our work Christmas Card this year, we decided to create a Xmas video for all to see (viewable here). To go along with the video we decided to create a iPhone app. This was a great way to play around with Monotouch and get a nice example of a Monotouch app up on the app store as well as to learn and understand the iPhone SDK and APIs. After a painless 10 day wait, the app was approved by Apple and is available to download on the App Store.

Good evening!

I had a request from my previous post about the DoneDone app to give a little insight on how the loading screens were created. I finally got round to creating an example project which shows one way of creating this sort of effect. The way I created the effect was to create a few controls (image view, activity indicator and message) on top of the view that's being displayed and mark them all as hidden by default. When the loading screen is to be shown - it will simply enable these controls to be viewed and when the action has finished - it will hide the controls again. This was something I quickly threw together on the DoneDone app and ideally - you'd use a separate "loading" view and add and remove it as a subview when the time is needed but this at least gives a starting point.

It seems that the default project templates that Monotouch provides doesn't include a FlipView template. This template normally provides a way of flipping a view to another view which displays different information. I created a demo project (which includes Jon Skeet's picture - aren't you lucky?) to demonstrate one way of creating this functionality. Craig over at ConceptDev posted a way of creating this functionality (see here: http://conceptdev.blogspot.com/2009/10/monotouch-flip-flop-with-uiview.html) however I quite like my implementation.

Monotouch Tips Part 1

A little background for the iPhone application...

I was going to do a blog post on a DoneDone iPhone app I have been developing, but I got a little carried away with Simon's fantastic core animation post here:

You may have noticed that Novell released a way of creating native iPhone applications with C# and potentially any other .Net language with Monotouch, only to find out that it's $399 for a single developer license. Fear not, last night Novell released a "trial" version of Monotouch which will enable you to develop these apps without the need to pay for a license. Using this trial means that you will not be able to run your application on the device (which is important for testing if you're looking to sell an application), this is similar to the way NimbleKit handle the way users can develop using their framework.