Alan Hietala’s Core Dump

So I’ve taken the plunge into iPhone development. Picked up the book Beginning iPhone Development which was recently reviewed on Slashdot. Yeah I still read slashdot, so sue me.

I’ve been learning the syntax of objective C and finding that its a bit of a learning curve to get used to reading it with ease. I’m sure that with some more time it will become second nature. Not having done smallTalk I don’t instinctively see [variable method:param:param].

I figured this would be a good time to learn the basics of game development too so the the first app I am going to write is Tetris. There are lots of great pointers over at GameDev.net so it shouldn’t be too large for a first project. Stay tuned for my progress on this.

When I first heard that palm was releasing another mobile platform I was rather skeptical. Mobile developers have a glut of platforms to build on, and to reach the majority of devices need to write for most of them. You can see why adding yet another mobile platform into the mix might be problematic.

My fears were abated though when I saw how simple, elegant and easy to develop for, the new palm devices are going to be. The entire environment seems to be built on webkit so all of the applications are built using standard xhtml, javascript and CSS. It is no surprise the new OS is called WebOS.

Palm Pre Official Video Tour from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

Does this sound familiar because it should. Firefox exensions are built in the exact same way. This method is nice becuase it lets a designer mock something up in xhtml and it is immediately useable by the phone delveloper. This is a huge benefit to rapidly building applications. The interesting thing is that many of the great firefox extensions may be fairly easily ported over to palm. This is purely speculation on my part but not outside the realm of possibility.

I am definitely looking forward to this device it looks like it will hold its weight agianst the likes of Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian et al. Matias Duarte and his team has done a great job in terms of usability, there are a lot of things I here that I wish were on all devices now. Good showing Palm.