Over the last couple of months we have been silently updating both the MonoMac APIs as well as the IDE support for it. All of the features that I talked back in March are now publicly available.

More code is now shared with the MonoTouch infrastructure, which means that every time that we improve our MonoTouch IDE support, MonoMac will be improved as well.

MonoDevelop Improvements for MonoMac

The latest version of MonoDevelop that we released contains a significant update for developers. In the past, you had to use a one-off dialog box to create packages, installers and prepare an app for AppStore distribution.

With the latest release, we have now turned these configuration options into settings that are part of the project. This means that you can now configure these based on your selected project configuration, you can automate the builds, save your settings and most importantly, you have many more options at your disposal:

MonoMac packaging settings.

Plenty of the settings that go into Info.plist are now available directly in the project settings as well as the support for maintaining your iCloud keys and sandbox requirements:

MacOS Project Settings.

We also brought the MonoTouch Info.plist editor into the IDE, this allows you to maintain your Info.plist directly from the IDE. It is also a convenient place to declare which file types your application exports and consumes:

Info.plist Editor.

New Launcher

In the past we used a shell script to start your program, the shell script would set a few environment variables and invoke Mono with your initial assembly.

We now ship a binary launcher that links with the Mono runtime and fixes several long standing issues involving application launching.

Getting the latest MonoMac

To get the latest support for MonoMac, merely download MonoDevelop 3.0.4.1 (our latest build available from monodevelop.com and you will get the entire package for Mac development.

Samples

New samples in MonoMac show how to use CoreAnimation to animate custom C# properties. Our own MacDoc sample which was supposed to be just a simple demo of WebKit, MonoMac and MonoDoc has turned into a full fledged documentation browser which is now part of our own products (MonoTouch).