Earlier this week, the Mono folks released the Mono Packager for OSX and refreshed the MonoMac library and templates. Developers can now create self-contained Mono applications which can be distributed via the Apple App Store. With the refresh, they baked the package creation, installer creation and signing process into MonoDevelop.
Not included in the release is the Mono Linker which is used to reduce executable size. Expect this to come in the next release of the Mono Packager.
Developer downloads of MonoMac were quite healthy over the holidays and trending upwards. Quote from Miguel de Icaza:
MonoMac 0.4 was installed by 263 developers, MonoMac 0.5 by 369 developers. Interesting considering that the holidays are a slow season.
James Clancey was able to load a simple compiled Winform app on his mac using Cocoa. And Frank Kruegar posted a short but impressive video of iCircuit, originally written in MonoTouch, running on MonoMac the same day.
As of this release and moving forward all MonoMac binaries will default to the C# 4.0 profile which was introduced in Mono 2.8.
