As he's been doing a lot lately, Apple CEO Steve Jobs replied to an email from a developer concerned about iPhone 4 SDK's ban on using cross-compilers like Flash CS5 or MonoTouch to create apps.

After a brief exchange about Daring Fireball's article on the matter, Greg Slepak wrote:

I still think it undermines Apple. You didn’t need this clause to get to where you are now with the iPhone’s market share, adding it just makes people lose respect for you and run for the hills, as a commenter to that article stated:

[...] I don’t think Apple has much to gain with 3.3.1, quite the opposite actually.

To which Jobs sent (not iPhone or iPad this time, but from his Mac):

We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.

That users are picking sides is interesting. Adobe wants to control the creation and distribution tools (Flash CS5 and the Flash plugin). Apple wants to control the creation and distribution tools (Xcode and App Store). There's a battle going on for the next generation of computing, with Google, Microsoft (who won the last one) and others deep in the mix and they all want desperately to win. Both are good or evil depending on how closely their goals mirror the individual's in question. So, while picking sides is inevitable for some, it's also part of each company's strategy.

[Tao Effect via 9to5Mac]

While Apple's ban on cross-compilers in the iPhone 4.0 SDK has raised a lot of discussion on the net, and generated some fiery responses from Adobe, AppleInsider claims a source who says the move had nothing to do with Flash CS5 or another other, specific cross-compiler, and everything to do with multitasking performance:

The primary reason for the change, say sources familiar with Apple's plans, is to support sophisticated new multitasking APIs in iPhone 4.0. The system will now be evaluating apps as they run in order to implement smart multitasking. It can't do this if apps are running within a runtime or are cross compiled with a foreign structure that doesn't behave identically to a native C/C++/Obj-C app.

"[The operating system] can't swap out resources, it can't pause some threads while allowing others to run, it can't selectively notify, etc. Apple needs full access to a properly-compiled app to do the pull off the tricks they are with this new OS," wrote one reader under the name Ktappe.

Apple is using a different kind of multitasking than we've seen before in mobile -- saved state combined with API-level services that take the place of running apps. Are Cocoa touch apps generated in Xcode really different enough from Flash or C#/.Net apps cross-compiled by Flash CS5 or MonoTouch to cause Apple's multitasking system problems?

We're not developers, you tell us.

Novell has announced MonoTouch, which will let developers write C#/.Net applications for the iPhone and iPod touch and compile them ahead of time, instead of the usual just-in-time method specifically prohibited by Apple's SDK.

Now, I'll state my bias at the outset -- I'm no more a fan of .Net than I am Flash, Silverlight, or Java. Code interpreters are historically more taxing on hardware and are far, far greater security risks than true native applications (most exploits target code interpreters these days). However, Monotouch compiling these ahead of time likely mitigates most of those factors.

That said, when TiPb first spoke with developers after the App Store announcement, many of them told us that, not only did they enjoy learning variant languages like the iPhone's native Objective-C/Cocoa, but didn't seem to be having too much trouble picking them up.

That said, no doubt there is a large, maybe even huge pool of .Net developers with no interest in stretching their programming portfolio yet still want to take advantage of the huge mobile platform the iPhone provides.

Bottom line, if they make great apps, and those apps work great on the iPhone, then more power to MonoTouch. Hopefully it easily earns back the $999 per year Enterprise subscription.

[Via InfoWorld. Thanks Fassy for the tip!]