Mobile Development Platforms

As you all know, the iPhone SDK was released a few days ago. Along with it came a plethora of applications. What really amazed me was the jump that Apple has made in mobile phone development. The iPhone is clearly way ahead of its competitors. As far as the high cost is concerned, it doesn't seem to be bothering many people (with them selling millions of phones in just a couple of days). Mobile phones have been considered one of the most complex devices to build. I disagree. What does suck about their development is the various tools which we use to develop them. People always say that phones have low memory and low processing capacity, and hence they are difficult to program. What we ultimately see is a poorly featured, closed system which has pretty much nothing to offer (other than maybe calls and a reminder software). The iPhone has broken exactly this barrier.

There have been other attempts too like OpenMoko. OpenMoko created a huge stir when they started advertising their ideas about a mobile development environment using GNU tools and Open Source libraries. The iPhone is going to offer a lot of competition to these people. A very popular open source GUI development platform Qt, also offers mobile application development features. A problem which plagues most of open source has been its "geekiness". I agree with this too. Linux based OS (especially systems like Ubuntu) are by far better than anything out there, but it still lacks eye-candy and aesthetics to "impress" the general public. I was thrilled to see Mark Shuttleworth making the statement about the look-and-feel of Ubuntu. Even the KDE folks have some cool stuff coming up as KDE 4. This would be amazing. There were extreme attempts like Beryl, Compiz, but well, we don't really need to go that far. I hope that the current stability and i-am-the-boss feeling which only Linux can give still stays with us after all these developments. So maybe we can expect an advanced open source API with some freaky interfaces out for the mobiles soon. :)