[fpc-devel] iphone development

[Jonas Maebe]

On 16 Sep 2009, at 01:06, ABorka wrote:

> How is freepascal's iphone development compares to this latest mono  
> way of creating native iphone apps?
>
> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/09/monotouch-drops-net-into-apples-walled-app-garden.ars

We don't distribute an interface to most iPhone frameworks, in part  
because the iPhone SDK licensing agreement forbids distributing any  
derivative works. The Mono guys apparently ignore this and do  
distribute a bunch of XML files generated from the files included in  
the iPhone SDK. So keep in mind that you are violating Apple's  
licensing agreement if you use their stuff (although Apple doesn't  
seem to care much about that, given that a lot of applications based  
on an engine using the precursor of MonoTouch, namely Unity3D, are  
shipping already). At any point, an application you write using that  
stuff could probably be yanked from the Apple store though (unless the  
Mono people have a redistribution agreement with Apple, but I doubt  
that).

> Reading the wiki it is not really a snap to set it up to be able to  
> develop iphone apps.

a) install the package
b) create a new Xcode project using the provided template
c) compile it/run it
d) see a nice spinning 3D FPC logo on your iPod/iPhone

(with an extra step between a) and b) if you're using the iPhone SDK  
3.0/3.1, because of a bug in the iPhone SDK linker). This does not  
include solving any troubles you may have with getting the certificate  
mess sorted out, because that's identical for regular Objective-C  
projects.

All the other information on the wiki is background information (a lot  
of it just repeating stuff from Apple's website to avoid having to  
answer questions from answer people who didn't read that information).


Jonas