One of the areas in new media that is experiencing phenomenal growth is mobile app development. Students see a large audience using smartphones and tablets, and as developers and entrepreneurs they want in on the market. I can’t blame them. I want in as well. Truth The money is good and the future for mobile devises is very strong. Due to the pressure of meeting my academic commitments I have been putting off training in mobile app development for the past year. Part of the issue was finding a quality school that teaches the material I needed at a reasonable price. This was simple enough to fix since Noble Desktop, the training center I use for much of my ongoing studies recently started offering classes in the fundamentals of mobile app programming.
The other reason for delaying the jump into app programming was in deciding which platform to use as I move forward in setting my training schedule. Should I spend my time focusing in on the Apple iOS platform and learn the languages and frameworks used for native Apple mobile apps, or dust off my old java skills and concentrate on an Android market that is growing at a faster rate than most other mobile devises? Or do I get radical and use a single cross platform development framework, like PhoneGap or Adobe’s Integrated Runtime (AIR) environment, to create apps for multiple systems? I decided to go with AIR because while the ability to develop one project for multiple platforms offers many advantages, it also offers many challenges. Also AIR enables me to leverage my experience with the Flash Actionscript 3 programming language to develop games and apps for multiple platforms.