Mobile Development (e.g. Android, iOS, etc)

Hey everyone (all two of you?)! It's been a while since I have posted on these boards, mainly because of classes. Another reason is because of the focus I am trying to put into mobile development. Back in the day, I spent a lot of time working on Web sites (anyone remember stormBoards, the offshoot of hailboards?). Well, last year I bought an Android phone and it got me extremely interested in Android Development. So, I thought I would post a thread here in order to broaden the horizons of this forum a bit, towards a more general sense of programming/development (instead of just Web sites). Even though I am an Android Developer/user thought I should include the iPhone in here since that is an extremely popular device amongst developers - one could argue that it paved the way for this surge towards mobile development.

Over the summer (in between my two jobs as a Web developer and bar patron), I decided to code up a simple app for Android devices that taught me the basics of the way Android works. I made a salary calculator, called it EasySal Calculator and published it just over a month ago (you can view my Web site by clicking the following:http://asandroid.blogspot.com/). If you read my latest blog post, you will see just how shocked I am at the amount of downloads I have received. Just last week I reached over 1,000 downloads, and am already up to nearly 1400 now. It's incredible. I credit that to the recent rise in Android powered phones.

So, has anyone else published any apps on any of the mobile app stores? Or are you interested in doing so?

 

Thanks! I feel like your professor might be correct. The activation rates for all these devices are ridiculous right now, which leads to a pretty large market. Add those into the already huge market of users and the amount of potential customers just keeps growing.

The programming language is Java. They have an addon for Eclipse that includes the API so it makes it a little easier to program. Using something called the Native Development Kit, you can use other languages, but I haven't gotten into that yet. As for web development, I never really got into the actual programming languages of the web), just HTML and CSS. I knew some php, but not enough to comment on how it correlates to Java/Anroid.

I do have to say that the way that the Developers Guide recommends going about the Android UI is strange, something I never seen before. They use XML files to define the UI (the buttons, text boxes, etc). And then you reference it in the code. You can explicitly define your UI straight in the code, but they recommend against that for some reason. It took some getting use to, but I liked it a whole lot better than Swing (not sure how familiar you are with Java).

 

That's awesome to hear Nem!

I've gotten into iPhone dev recently. I haven't created anything yet but I'm learning Objective-C and how to use XCode.

 

That's cool. Let me know if you publish one, I'd like to check it out.

I want to get into iPhone development, but do not have a Mac. I am in a course right now where I have to develop an iPhone app for the city I am living in, and they have us using an environment called Appcelerator Titanium. You code in Javascript and it creates an Android and an iPhone app out of it. Has anyone dealt with this (or something similar)? I hate the thing, I wish I could just be programming in straight Java or Objective-C.

 

I've never heard of that programming environment. I'm not a big fan of frameworks even though they're supposed to make things easier.

I want to start with Java at some point as well.

 

Anyone know of a online course or maybe a place in GA that will teach how to make iPhone App ? I really want to get in to them now

 

Your best bet is to pick up an Objective C book and an All in One iPhone Dev book.