BKeeney Briefs

Interesting little blurb at http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2010/05/26/apple-will-steve-ballmer-show-up-at-the-wwdc-keynote/ about Microsoft presenting at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (otherwise known as WWDC) to show off Visual Studio for iPad/iPhone and general Mac OS X development.

Geeze.  How many levels of wrong is this rumor?  You think Apple is going to trust Microsoft with the keys to their iPhone/iPad kingdom?  I don’t think so.  Apple has worked too hard building xCode and Cocoa Touch to let a 3rd party develop for iPhone/iPad.  If this does happen, then Apple might as well give Adobe a call and let them know they can restart their iPhone/iPad programs too.  And we all know where that feud isn’t over yet.

Where this might make sense is desktop applications.  Microsoft, while doing all that work to write Microsoft Office for the Mac in Cocoa, wrote their own Cocoa libraries and other Mac GUI editors and put it into Visual Studio.  Seems like an awful lot of work with minimal gain for Microsoft unless they’ve decided to make a push in REAL Software’s corner.  They certainly have the knowledge and resources to do such a product.

While I don’t think this rumor has legs it does make you think.  No doubt Microsoft is feeling the pinch of developers learning Cocoa which does nothing for Microsoft.  If they developed a cross-platform Visual Studio it stems the bleeding because now developers don’t have an either/or decision to make.  Learning a new development tool and frameworks suck and letting all those Windows developers develop for Mac and Windows using their tool keeps Microsoft in the game.  It doesn’t help them with iPhone/iPad development (now) but in five years who knows.  If it does happen it will generate some serious buzz which is something Microsoft wants (needs?).

What does this do, if true, to our favorite development tools company located in Austin?  I don’t think it would be good news.

More info on Cocotron can be found at http://www.cocotron.org/.  Their stated goal is:

The purpose of the project is to provide an easy to use cross-platform solution for Objective-C development.

There’s a blog post at Mac Daddy World at http://macdaddyworld.com/2008/10/27/adventures-in-cocotron/

Now I can say with some certainty that xCode and Objective C isn’t as easy to learn and use as REALbasic but a programming language is a programming language and we can all learn “one more” language and IDE.  Certainly one of the truths about REALbasic is that all of it’s controls are a compromise and not as feature rich as their .NET and Cocoa brethren.  Cocoatron has the potential of changing some minds of people who might be looking at REALbasic and go with Cocoa if controls on both platforms are nearly identical.

It seems that Cocotron isn’t an officially supported Apple product but that might not matter in the long run if enough developers start using it.  Stranger things have happened in other platforms where something becomes a de-facto standard.  It wouldn’t surprise me either that Apple has a skunkworks project that does this as well so it’s possible that at any point Apple could go, “Because of demand, here’s the official Cocoa for Windows frameworks.”

One major issue I see with Cocotron is that you can only do code development on the Mac.  That is certainly one of RB’s strengths where you can run on Windows, Linux or Macintosh OS X and compile and debug for the other platforms (Pro editions only).

One thing that is similar to RB is that it looks like you can debug your Windows app while running in the xCode IDE.  I wonder how fast or slow that is?  I might just fire up xCode this weekend.

Your thoughts?