Well I’ve started to reach out beyond iPhone in my development skill set. In December of last year I started learning how to develop in Android. Now I’m doing research on the Palm Pre and Blackberry. I’m guessing ‘Mobile Development Guru’ will be my next job title.
So far my Android development experience has been a positive one. The initial environment doesn’t give you as much of the pretty as Apple provides out of the box, but it is all very functional. With a little bit of customization you can make things look nicer very quickly. It also is very easily customizable with its use of styles. This is probably my favorite part of Android at the moment. If there was one thing I wish iPhone had; it would be a built in easy style sheet implementation. Having originally come from a Java background, I’ve found Android development has been pretty easy to pick up. In addition, my iPhone development experience has helped me somewhat pick up how to design applications for the Android mobile experience, both architecturally and visually. My only fear with the number of Android devices coming out is that it will fall victim to J2ME’s fate. With all different manufacturers pumping out their own Android brand phone, we can only hope they think of the developers. The pain and agony I felt just trying to get a single J2ME application I developed to run properly on my Razr V3xx alone was enough to drive me away from the platform. Here’s hoping Android continues to improve and be compatible with all phones without any special cases to look out for.
My research into Palm Pre and Blackberry apps is still young, but I’ll be sure to talk more about my experiences with these SDKs in the future. For now, I’ll just mention that I wish the Blackberry SDK has a Mac OSX version supported. There are a few open source work arounds, but if one stumbles upon issues in those there is a lack of support. My office is predominately an Apple company with everyone running on OSX minus a few outdated Windows laptops; so it makes it a little tougher for me to get started.
Lots of fun work in the pipeline, I’ll announce it on here as it is released.
