How did I get here? My route to Android, iPhone, Windows Phone 7, and interest in Mobile Devices
- by Wallym
I get asked all the time how/why I got interested in
mobile and jumped on this fairly early. I tend to give half answers
because it wasn't just one thing that took me to mobile, but a whole
host of separate ivents culminating in a specific event where I wasdoing
market research in May/June 2008. Let me throw out the events and the
facts about me:
I tend to like new, different, cool stuff. I
jumped on .NET early on. I jumped on Ajax early on. I don't jump on
every new technology that comes down the road, I'm probably the only
person on the planet that doesn't "get" MVC, though I acknowledge that a
lot of people do and it solves a number of problems in the default
settings of ASP.NET WebForms.
I remember buying an early Windows CE device. It
was interesting, but dang, this stylus thing sucks. After I lost my
third stylus, i just gave up.
I got my first mobile phone in early 1999. Reception was crappy, but I could see the value in being mobile.
In 1999, I worked on a manufacturing systems
project. One piece of the projects was a set of handheld devices on the
shop floor. While the UI was a crappy DOS based, yes I said DOS as in
Disk Operating System Version 6.22, I could see that the wireless world
was a direction I wanted to be in.
In 2000, Microsoft released the first public alpha
of .NET. Very cool stuff indeed. One piece of the puzzle was a set of
mobile controls for ASP.NET. I build numerous test apps as well as
mobile version using these mobile controls. Now, the mobile UIs of the
time were based on WML, which was crap.
I could real all the analysis of mobile and read
all about growth rates. Now, you have to realize that growth rates can
be impressive when dealing with small numbers, but I knew it was a
comer.
In our first book, I got talked out of mobile because of the line from the publisher "Wally, mobile doesn't sell."
Blackberry was the dominant device of the mid
2000s. Its users were referred to as "Crackberry addicts."
Unfortunately, the mobile development experience for native apps was
crap and the web experience was fairly rough as well, but if they could
get the ecosystem started, other phones and better blackberryies would
come out. I finally jumped into using a blackberry.
Sometime around 2006, I heard "Wally, mobile
doesn't sell" again. Now, anyone that knows me knows that someone
saying something like this to me means I'll keep trying it.
The phones of the mid 2000s were moving to be more
graphical, but there were too many that had this idea that they had to
use a stylus. Stylus suck. They get lost too easily.
I worked on a project in 2007 and 2008 for a
startup trying to answer the question of "What is there to do where I am
at?" For some reason, they wanted to be tied to PCs. As it became
obvious that they were having problems, their investor asked us to do
some market research and to figure out what the marketplace did want.
One of the important things that I figured out was the we lived in a
mobile world and if you had a mobile app, it need to be on a mobile
device, not tied to a desktop/laptop/netbook device. If there was any single event, this was it - I was doing some market research and sat and talked to people in a bar/restaurant in Atlanta called "The Grove" on Lavista.
The consensus of the people that I talked to was that they wanted their
data where ever they were at, laptop, pc, mobile, whereever.
In 2007, Apple released the iPhone. Wow, what an
impressive device, even with all the problems of a 1st generation
device. I bought an iPod Touch 1st generation to understand touch
better, one of the best decisions I ever made.
I decided in late 2008, to make a move into cloud,
for a number of reasons. I was working on an example app. In April,
2009, one of my friends at Microsoft said "don't mention my name with
this, but you need an iPhone front end for this app." How do you get on
the iPhone. Well, there are a number of ways including:
ObjectiveC. Its hard to teach an old dog new tricks, and this dog knows .NET, not ObjectiveC.
HTML, web, javascript optimized interface. yeah, this is possible.
PhoneGap. Now, this is interesting, take an html
interface and get it to run on the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and
other platforms. I thought that this way made the most sense for
me until.........
MonoTouch. In May/June 2009, Novell announced a
way for .NET/c# developers to write apps for the iPhone. This is the
way that made the most sense to me.
Titanium by Appcelerator. This is similar in
concept to PhoneGap. I haven't played with this much but do want to
learn more about it.
In July, 2009, I emailed one of my contacts at Wrox
to see if they would be interested in a short MonoTouch ebook in their
Wrox Blox format. I fully expected another response along the lines of
"Wally, mobile doesn't sell." The response I got was "Wally, iPhone is
H O T, get started immediately, can you have this to me before Labor
Day." Not quite the response I expected. Thankfully, we didn't make
the Labor Day, first draft date. I kept pushing back because I had a
feeling that things were not going to be quite as polished and feature
rich as necessary. After all, Novell doesn't have the resouces of
Microsoft's developer division.
The ebook shipped on November 30, 2009.
On about December, 15, 2009, my editor emailed and
said "Your ebook is selling really well, lets do a full book and it by
March 1 so get started." Thankfully, guys like Craig Dunn and Chris
Hardy were interested along with Martin and Ror joinged us later on.
I bought my wife an iPhone 3Gs in early 2010 to go along with all my iPod Touch devices.
I tried to pretend in 2010 that I wasn't that
interested in mobile and still had interest in the desktop
technologies. I love the technologies and continue to use them today,
but that isn't where my interest is right now. I'm just about all
mobile all the time with my energies.
Our book shipped in the beginning of July, 2010 right in the middle of the Apple FUD.I've been looking at Mobile Web as a way around the AppStores and Apple FUD problems of 2010.
With all the Apple self FUD, we became interested in Android.I
went up to Dino Esposito at DevConnections in Las Vegas at introduced
myself. I've always tried to keep up with what Dino has been doing. I
was shocked, he wanted to meet me. We must have talked for 1.5 hours.
It was way more time than I deserved. If you get a chance, go and
introduce yourself to Dino. He's a great guy.
Microsoft released Windows Phone 7 in the Fall of
2010. I'm not doing development on that platform at this time. I think
they have a very interesting user interface. The devices are being
positively reviewed. For my purposes, the devices are limited at this
point in time. We'll see what 2011 brings as far as updates to the
operating system. I need multitasking/background processing and html5
in the browser. Add that as well as acceptance in the marketplace and
I'll be more interested in the device.
Obviosuly, I'm now working on a MonoDroid book .
I own Android and iPhone/iOS devices. I am
currently working on some startup ideas and am exploring as much in that
area as I can.
For 2011, I'm planning on speaking at Android
Developer's Conference (AnDevCon) and Mobile Connections. I'm really
excited about this.
I have a couple of magazine articles coming out in 2011 on Android and iPhone development with the Mono technologies.is
Mono "The Answer"? What's "The Question?" I think it will work for me.
It might work for you, it might not. it depends on your situation.
Its the current horse that I am riding. I might find a better horse
tomorrow.
So, that's how I got here. I'm in love with mobile.
Mobile native apps on the device as well as mobile web. I'm into all
this cool stuff. Where are you at?
