mdk

Clone wars

28 Jan 2007 » permalink

 

 

On the above four screenshots one can see a simple mono application running in four different environments — windows xp, linux, nokia 770 and nokia n800. The binary has been compiled once and executed without any changes on the four different platforms.

The application in question (MonoEye) is a somewhat more advanced “hello world” — it’ll show a random picture of whatever the user enters in the entry box. It does so by picking up a random photo from flickr that has a given tag applied. So, when you enter ‘monkey’ you get a random photo of a monkey. Actually, sometimes you get other strange results — apparently some people are sane weird enough to tag their girlfriend photos with a ‘monkey’ tag.

In any case this simple application does something “real” and useful: A little bit of network http access A little bit of regexp for RSS parsing A little bit of threading (the photo is downloaded in a separate thread) A little bit of gtk

…and all this stuff works nicely on all the four mentioned platforms.

I don’t think being cross-platform is the biggest advantage of mono, but I smell some interesting opportunities here.