Major Xamarin.Mac Updates

We are happy to announce a few major updates to Xamarin.Mac. The first major update is the result of more than a year of development on our API bindings and Mono’s runtime which brings the following features to Xamarin.Mac:

• 64-bit support
• New 64-bit Frameworks
• Support for lighter mobile profile
• Easier code sharing between Mac and iOS

These features are available today in the Beta channel.

On top of these new features we have been hard at work binding the new Mac OS X Yosemite APIs. We are pleased to announce support for Yosemite is now available. Since Yosemite is still an unreleased platform and may continue to change you will find these APIs in the Alpha channel along with all of the other features I mentioned earlier.

64-bit support & Easier Code Sharing

We recently announced the brand new Unified API for Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Mac. The Unified API allows developers to support both 32 bit and 64 bit applications with the same source code (as well as binaries) on both Mac and iOS.

In addition to this we also took the time to enhance the code sharing story between iOS and Mac. An example of this is that you no longer are required to add any namespace prefixes. This means code that looked like this:

#if MAC
using MonoMac.Foundation;
#elif IOS
using MonoTouch.Foundation;
#endif

Can now simply be written in one line:

using Foundation;

For more information, read our new Guides for Cross Platform Mac and iOS code.

New 64-bit Frameworks

With the introduction of our Unified API we are finally able to support all of those 64 bit-only frameworks that Apple has introduced in the last few years, including but certainly not limited to the many new 64 bit-only frameworks in Yosemite. Shadows in Scene Kit

Lightweight Profile

Also with the Unified API comes the ability for users to adopt Xamarin’s Mobile profile. The Mobile profile is the same API profile that we use on Android and iOS which has been designed to be linkable and have a much smaller footprint on disk than the regular desktop edition. This is convenient for applications going into the AppStore or that wish to share more code across Android and iOS.

Samples!

Many of our Mac samples are being ported to the Unified API and currently live in their own branch. In addition, we are starting to publish our internal ports of the Yosemite samples which can be found in the Yosemite directory.