Mobile Application Development

Quest of developing mobile phones got to me as well. With 140,000 application in the Apple appstore and similar number of apps in android store, I was fascinated to realize that sooner or later our phones will be the most powerful device that we will own.

I started in this journey to develop my first application on a iOS or android device. Being a developer already with 17 years of development experience under by belt made me wonder, do i learn a new programming language another platform. How do i go about developing new application for these new devices.

Here is the infrastructure needed to develop for these devices

iOS

1. Need a MAC computer with OSX (Snow Leopard or Lion) . -- Cost $800 - $1200 approx.
2. Registration to the Apple developer program -- Cost $99/year

Android

1. PC with atleast 4 Gb or RAM (2Gb works will be too slow) -- Cost $300 - $800
   
2. Operating system is more flexible here. Any Java compatible OS (windows, Linux, OSX, Ubuntu, Solaris, etc.)
3. Registration to Android market

That costs a ton of money if i want to develop applications in both iOS and Android. For someone with serious product vision and ROI planning, this amount may seem miniscule. But for a hobby developer who is starting from scratch it costs a ton. Dont get disappointed just yet. There are other ways you can go about this.

Introducing Hackintosh
You could use a PC dual boot it to have Windows 7 or XP on one partition and MAC on the other. Although, according to Apple it is not legal to install OSX on non Apple hardware.

More Options

If you possess a intel based PC and the processor is capable of VT (virtual technology). You will not need to install OSX instead run it using VMWare or Virtual Box.

Tools
Traditionally for iOS development, programmers would need to use XCode and program using objective-C. Another new language to learn and adopt.

Android developers need to know Java (which is quite common) and use Eclipse IDE along with Android tool kit.

New Tools (Popular ones)

Titanium - Appcelerator - Javascript based development platform. Javascript being one of the widely used web development scripting language. Titanium API are integrated into well known Aptana IDE. Titanium based application provides native look for the application.

Requires: iOS SDK for iOS development, andriod SDK for android development.
Website: www.appcelerator.com

Cost : Free, starting from $49/month and more

Phone Gap - Javascript based library. Can be used used on OSX along with XCode and Eclipse on PC. Phone Gap library can be used to develop application on various platforms eg:- iOS, Android, Palm, Symbion, Web OS. One draw back on Phone Gap is the apps developed do not have a native look.

Requires: iOS SDK for iOS development, andriod SDK for android development.
Website: www.phonegap.com

Cost : Free

More to come on tools, tips, tricks and samples