In my spare time (if there is such a thing) I've been studying different mobile programming environments. iPhone iOS development is rather interesting and I've been through several good books on the subject. I think I am a little hampered by the rapid advancement of the OS making the books quickly out of date. The Xcode environment is really nice if strange with the Objective-C programming language and the drag and drop Interface Builder. Installation of Xcode and Interface Builder requires no user intervention other than downloading the package.

Today I finally got time to start programing for the Android environment. After a quick head count of iPhones/iPod Touches/iPads in the vicinity of Noded South I think Android has a slight lead. The real challenge is that Android development can be done on any OS; Mac, Windows, or Linux, makes it harder to create a standard programming environment. So creating a place to work on Android Apps takes much more work. First step is to load the Eclipse IDE a pretty nice Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Then you need to download the Android SDK and put it in some directory and (horror of horrors) open a terminal session and modify the $PATH. Once that is done you can load the Android plugin for Eclipse from the Eclipse IDE. I somehow got everything working in a couple of hours and created my first Hello Android app.

In all honesty I did write a rather extensive mobile application several (hundred) years ago using Visual Basic .Net. I don't remember what version of Microsoft Windows Mobile I used but if Microsoft had any viable hardware and a distribution system I would have been writing mobile apps a long time ago.