Thinking about where to go with my personal development projects. I’ve got any number of web oriented work that is interesting enough but I’ve thought about getting into mobile development now particularly with the advent of the mobile tablet. Personally the tablet doesn’t appeal to me as the form factor is far too large for easy carrying, the lack of a hardware keyboard makes any lengthy typing painful and the whole tablet genre could be easily replaced by a netbook. IMO the primary reason for buying/using a tablet seems to be impressing friends, family and complete strangers with the coolness factor. You can get a docking station, hardware keyboard and even a mouse for tablets … which then begs the question ‘why tablet?’.
Still there are so many potential display technologies on the horizon that sooner or later mobile devices will completely supplant desktop computers and probably even laptops. Cloud computing offers mobile users the ability to host applications in data centers already, though few appreciate this technique and even fewer understand it. Sooner or later someone is going to realize that offering people the ability to use, store and access applications + data through a mobile device will be the killer application that definitely will spell the destruction of Microsoft’s core OS business.
To the goal of mastering development in Android, iPhone/iPod and Blackberry I’ll be downloading SDKs, garnering reference websites and buying my first Mac … a Mac Mini. Really Apple. Did you have to require buying/using a Mac just to develop applications for the iPhone/iPod? The required Mac has an Intel CPU. Couldn’t any OS have done the job with the proper SDK + appropriate libraries? I suppose adding Mac development to my resume won’t hurt but Windows irritates me enough as it is so learning yet another OS just to do development. Ugh.
Well everything is an opportunity, even if it is to pull hair out by the roots. And as I generally shave my head bald now I’m guessing that won’t be a big a deal as when I was 20. 