Android and iOS Development – the easy way!

Hi,

I’ve been getting a lot of emails lately that are kinda like this:

Stef, I want to learn how to create apps for iPhones, iPads and Android devices … can you teach me!

Well the good news is that I am looking into this now. The bad news is that I don’t have anything ready … yet. That said, I do have some useful information and strategies for people who want to jump on this bandwagon quickly and easily.

Listen up …

iOS is for iPhones and iPads

That means you need to learn objective C … if you want to have total control over the iOS device. More on that later.

Google’s Android – on phones and tablets.

That means you need to learn a subset of Java (basically stripped down Java) if you want to have total control of the devices.

About objective C and Java

I don’t know much about objective C (but I’ve heard things …) but I do know a lot about Java. In both cases, many junior level PHP programmers might have a hard time with these languages because they require a deeper understanding of OOP.

The solution: HTML 5 and CSS3

The great thing about mobile applications, is that we expect that most of the time, they will be connected to the Internet – we assume that the apps will interact online at some point if not all the time.

This opens up the possibility of moving some of the heavy lifting over to the server where PHP can take care of biz for you. This MAY minimize the need to have to go down to the core of the device, forcing you to use Java or Objective C … depending on the device of course.

In the meantime, you can use HTML 5’s nifty new ability for local storage (of files,) to handle the times when a smart-phone is NOT online. How often does that happen …?

Stefan Mischook
killerphp.com