Poll: You and Mobile Development • Hacker News Board

josteink wrote: post #10

Thinking about doing Android-apps. And definitely thinking about exploiting the platforms (current) lack of tablet-optimised apps to make my own stand out.

Yeah, that's exactly where I am. The current lack of Android tablet apps is actually kind of exciting - we're in the calm before the storm, and anyone who puts out a kickass Android tablet app now is in a good position.

Re: Poll: You and Mobile Development

#14

Post by ardit33 » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 6:44 PM UTC

DenisM wrote: post #11

lynaghk wrote: post #3

Kindle

Oh! How is it?

A limited version of Java 1.4, the UI set is custom build, Writing a kindlet bit similar to writing an old fashioned applet. Limited memory/processing power though, but you can do fun some stuff, but the eInk slow refresh rates is the largest limitation.

Re: Poll: You and Mobile Development

#15

Post by abuzzooz » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 6:44 PM UTC

I consider myself a mere tinkerer in mobile development (my day job does not involve such technologies directly). I like to learn new stuff, just out of curiosity. In the past I published an iOS game which netted me a whopping $55. I also have an android game in active (but very very slow) development, as well as a mobile-friendly web app. I don't expect to monetize (or even finish) the latter.

Re: Poll: You and Mobile Development

#16

Post by pointyhat » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 6:45 PM UTC

kragniz wrote: post #7

PalmOS 5! A tad outdated, but still running fine. It's "fun" to write apps in Pascal.

Still works though; a thing that many people don't consider!

Re: Poll: You and Mobile Development

#17

Post by davidw » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 6:58 PM UTC

acangiano wrote: post #5

dotmanish wrote: post #2

You missed J2ME (which has certain, but not 100% overlap with Symbian OS development). Now even Bada supports J2ME apps.

Darn, I forgot to list it. I won't add it now though, as it would not be fair. There is an Other option for what is worth. If Other gets a huge number of votes, we'll know that options such as J2ME and others have a somewhat large market share among HNers, and it's not all about Android and iOS.

It's only an hour old - it's not as if this is precise science in any event. Phones with J2ME are very, very widespread. Granted, they don't do much, and are not the future, but it's probably still an interesting space for the right kind of niche product.

Re: Poll: You and Mobile Development

#18

Post by pilif » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 7:00 PM UTC

For 5 years now I've been occasionally writing more features for Windows CE based barcode scanners. I wouldn't say that qualifies as "Windows Phone", so I didn't vote for that.

Thankfully by now we are more and more replacing these Windows CE things with iphones plus sleeves with barcode scanners which gives us a nicer API and the end user gets a much cooler device to work with.

The .NET Compact Framework is a beast: It's extremely slow and still it happens more often than not that you need something, you check the documentation, you find it, only to read that it's only supported on the desktop.

And don't get me started on the development/run/debug cycle: Both the emulator and the actual device are slow and after the 200st time that crappy assistant offered me to register my barcode scanner or even emulator(!) with Microsoft, I lost all the love that might still have been left.

Oh. And the SDKs for the scanners have this distinct feeling of being software written by hardware people when I look at how "convenient" they are to use. My personal favorite: The driver that hard-crashes the device whenever you terminate the application from the debugger. Yeah. Hit that stop-button you are used to and you'll have to wait through another 3 minute reboot cycle.

You iphone and android people have it so nice

Re: Poll: You and Mobile Development

#19

Post by Ubersoldat » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 7:10 PM UTC

pointyhat wrote: post #12

dotmanish wrote: post #2

You missed J2ME (which has certain, but not 100% overlap with Symbian OS development). Now even Bada supports J2ME apps.

+1 for J2ME. Some of us will not let our Nokia 6303's go :)

Not only on old phones, think about all those Chinese ripoffs of the iPhone, Nokia, etc... yeah! running J2ME!

Re: Poll: You and Mobile Development

#20

Post by vital101 » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 7:13 PM UTC

simonsarris wrote: post #9

Spending all of my programming time these days doing HTML5 Canvas stuff (work, personal projects, writing tutorials, helping people on StackOverflow, and helping those who email me for help) Canvas is definitely on a slow-but-steady rise in popularity - there are a lot more questions each day on SO than there were a year ago. It's kind of nice to watch it grow, in a way. I picked "Mobile-friendly Web development" tho…

Once we start to see hardware accelerated Canvas on mobile devices, I think a lot of the mobile development will move towards HTML5.