Some Tidbits on Mobile Application Development
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Are you a newbie planning to try your hand at mobile application development? I know it can be very daunting especially if you do not have advanced knowledge of any particular development platform or don’t know which language to concentrate upon.
In my search for some basic information on this area, here’s what I came across:
What Language to Use?
Mobile applications today use a myriad of technologies — of course, apart from the common stuff such as Cocoa for iPhone app development.
A survey showed that the use of VoiceXML has increased lately and almost 23% of mobile developers use it, whereas the use of Macromedia Flash has gone up too — almost 38% of developers use it. RFID is also another technology that is gaining popularity among wireless developers.
This page gives some useful tutorials on building VoiceXML Applications.
If you are looking for a tool to connect your back-end application, you can do it by using XML/SOAP/XML-RPC. Some developers also doing this using ADO.net or messaging, but that’s not a very popular method.
Different Ideas for Applications
An amazing blog post here outlines the eleven most popular app development trends for this year. Here are some that I found quite interesting:
A big entry barrier for newbies
There are hundreds of large development companies that focus their entire resources — backed up by venture capital — in developing new apps quickly and adding regular enhancements to them. In such a scenario, a new developer may have an even harder time trying to get accepted by users.
In other words, you probably can’t treat mobile app development as a pet project on the side anymore. If you have a killer idea, try to get some big guns behind you and do it like any other business would do. Otherwise, chances are you may remain obscure despite having created a great application.
iPhone App Development is As Good as Over for New Guys
It is not unheard of for Apple to rub its appstore developers the wrong way and force them to conform to their rigid standards. Therefore, many experienced developers and major companies are waiting for an opportunity to move to something else that provides them with more freedom.
You might want to keep that in mind when you choose a particular platform for your project.
Augmented Reality
I don’t think I should say much about this other than to provide you with an excerpt from the original page:
Imagine walking by a retail store, have an alert pushed to your device that the store has the exact brand and size of jeans you’ve put on your wish list, then being able to hold up your phone and find that exact pair within inches inside a 20,000 square foot warehouse, or to instantaneously search the web for the best price on that pair of jeans, all through one mobile app.
Tell me you don’t find that cool!
If you have heard of any other such cool ideas, feel free to leave your comment.
