Going Android

Well I obviously had some free time lately as I can't do much outside of my house so I spend some time thinking about doing something usefull. I am not unhappy about not coding anymore for a living but I still feel the need to explore and learn; on the other hand I have specific requirements about software for my mobile phone so I decided to combine both needs and to start developing for my mobile.

Now I own a WiMo HTC Pro so the first intention was obviously to set up a development environment and start developing with the Windows Mobile SDK. After a few hours of not being really happy with what I had it occured to me that it would be usefull to check other mobile OSes and see which one would suit me the best. Here's the story

I've not done this really scientifically as I'm no requirement engineer but I tried to come up with a few GOs ans no-GOs:

1. The development environment shall be free and run on my Linux Desktop no matter of hosted or as a virtual guest in VMWare or VirtualBox
2. The target mobile OS shall offer enough standard application for me not to have to develop everything from scratch. My standard needs are a contact/calendar, email, web

And this is how I ranked.

I must admit before having this crazy idea I was dreaming of an iPhone because I really like the concept. Unfortunately having a second look showed me that from a developer perspective it's a no-GO:

• Developing for iPhone required a Mac and I don't have the money for that nor is there a viable way to run it virtualized
• The concept of the Apple Store is nice but I don't like the policy of censorship Apple is showing us these days
• I used to be a big fan of Next so I know the IDE but I dislike C and objective-C is not that much better in my eyes

That was the first idea and I really wanted to start there as I already own the phone. After looking at it a little close I came to following result:

• Visual Studio express come for free but unfortunately the requirement for the Windows Mobile SDK is the plain Visual Studio and didn't want to live from trials
• .NET is powerfull and comes with different programming languages so I guess I would have been happy with C#

The hurdle of the IDE lead me to explore further as it was kind of a no-GO.

Well the N900 looks really great and I liked the idea of having a Linux without any restrictions. but:

• The Platform is too new or I am to early. I remember the days of the Sharp Zaurus that was a really cool device but the standard apps sucked and no-one ever started developing/delivering serious apps for that platform
• Did I mention I dislike C

Now it gets interesting:

• The default programming language for the SDK is Java, I like Java a lot
• There is a NDK for native development just in case
• It runs on Linux even if hardly restricted for a normal user
• The IDE is Eclipse (getting more and more interesting)

Obviously quite some good arguments to look at Android a little closer and I did:

• It took me one hour to install the IDE, the SDK, load and modify my first “Hello world” project and run it in the emulator
• After a day I was proudly running my first application, a one timee password generator in its version 0.1
• I started using the emu to read my emails and kindof liked the look and feel (version 1.6)