JestinStoffel.com

Short answer: No.

Long answer:
For a while now, I have concerned that mobile phones have been creating a platform war, much like we have in desktop development. The recent release of MonoTouch by Novell has given me hope that there might be a standard development platform for all popular mobile phones. MonoTouch is the latest bit of brilliance to come out of the Mono Project, and it allows for .NET development on the iPhone.

As anyone who has heard me rant about Apple very well knows, I am not a fan of the iPhone. In summary, I think it is a closed platform for developers, and Apple intentionally aims to control what innovation is allowed on their device. As a self-proclaimed (and self-righteous) innovator, I take offense to this. However, I have been a huge fan of the work done by Gnome founder Miguel de Icaza and the Mono Project, which has created an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework. The Mono project has allowed .NET code to run on Linux and OSX, as well as providing development tools for creating new .NET applications. Now, I can create iPhone apps in .NET! Awesome!

Unfortunately, MonoTouch has no known plans for extending its capabilities to Google's Android, Palm's WebOS, or the BlackBerry platform. However, they could. Right now, if a company wants to develop an app for all platforms, they need at least 4 different code streams to maintain for the same app. Until I see some plans for multiplatform support, I won't get too excited. Still, I will remain hopeful that a desktop originating cross-platform development suite will take over development in the mobile market.

Come'on, Novell. Give us what we want!