In the past 18 months I started to spend a lot of time on OSX and iOS due to our MonoTouch project. MonoTouch was our effort to blend seamlessly the iOS Objective-C APIs with the C# and ECMA CLI APIs. This is probably one of our nicest bindings that we have ever done for a native API, and it build on the experience from previous attempts like CocoaSharp, MonoObjc and other bindings that were created for the Mac in the past seven years.

The MonoTouch design and binding patterns proved to be very useful, and Geoff Norton and myself decided to bring the same design and patterns from iOS to OSX. This is how the new MonoMac bindings were created. While MonoTouch is a proprietary and commercial produce, MonoMac is open source and licensed under the MIT X11 license.

Building MonoMac has been a very fun experience, as the scope of the APIs is larger and also as it seems to have filled a void in the space. As the binding bootstraps, we are starting to see both users and contributors that have helped us move MonoMac faster by providing help with the bindings, polishing the API or writing samples that show how to use MonoMac.

My personal blog did not feel like the right place to share tips and tricks on iOS and OSX development for two main reasons: (a) tips and tricks were bound to be fairly boring for people interested in other topics that I blog about, and (b) because both of these operating environments are proprietary and I feel that sites that have historically aggregated my blog did so for its open source content.