Free Blackberry Playbook Part 1

Last week I released my first Android app on the Android Market and it has garnered a few downloads.  Recently RIM started a promotion to give away free Playbooks to developers who submitted their app to the Blackberry App World store.  Converting the .apk to the .bar file was very simple.  They provide an online tool that makes it simple or you can install the tools to sign and convert the .bar files in Eclipse.  Sadly as easy as it was to convert the app, it was just as hard to actually submit it.  So far I have received two rejections based on parts of the submission process that I failed to do properly.  These steps are not that clear, so hopefully they can add some clarity to this process.  Anyways....now I wait.  Lets hope for approval and also qualifying for the free tablet.

First Android App

So today after working on and off for about 3 weeks, I just released my first application on the Android Market.  You can find it Here.  Its just a simple utility to help keep score when playing boardgames or card games like Munchkin!  It was surprisingly easy going back to JAVA after spending most of my time in the .NET world.  I'm looking forward to making this app a bit more polished, and to my future applications.

Development from Chromebook

I have been able to spend a few days with my Chromebook..and I have to say I still love it.  At first I felt that the OS was a bit limiiting by only allowing me use web apps, but after doing some digging there are some real gems out there that really adds to my attempt to move to  the cloud.  I already have been using the various Google products such as Docs, Gmail, Calendar, but I really wanted to be able to do some web dev on my niffty new device.  My desired platforms included RoR, PHP, and HTML.  My focus was primarily Rails.  So after searching I found a pretty decent cloud IDE and also some pretty easy hosting that so far looks like it might satisfy my  requirements.

Heroku
This was recommended to me by a co-worker who currently uses it for various small rails projects.  I started have second thoughts about it when I learned it used git instead of mercurial but after getting everything setup it really makes for an easy free host.

EXO 
This is a pretty cool cloud IDE.  I believe it is currently in beta, so I really hope it makes it to release.  Part of what makes it cool is that it provides integration with git and heroku making it pretty simple to work in source control and push to your hosted environment.

If you are looking to try developing in the cloud definitely look at giving these tools a try.

Web Apps

So I'm writing this from my Chrome book an d I have to say it has me thinking hard about the future of mobile development. It seems that writing mobile apps is a hot bed for all kinds of developers, but the problem with this is that I have to learn Objective-C for iOS, java for Android and I don't even know what for the rest of the mobile platforms. Here is where the beauty of web apps come in. I can develop in a language that presents content in a standard look and feel for all platforms. I think HTML 5 is going to really help close between web apps and native apps...plus I can deploy my app with ease and not have to worry about dealing with an app store. I'm really starting to consider just doing my personal project as a web app and putting the Objective-C dev on ice. Thoughts?

Curse you iOS!!

This weekend has been pretty interesting. I spent a good portion of it trying to get my rails/mysql project into some free hosting. When I finally was able to get my DB stuff setup and start on moving my rails project I found out that the crappy hosting site does not support RAILS3. This was very disappointing. Later I start talking to my dad to get some him started on the iOS section but it sounds like he is going to be a bit busy with another application. So it appears that I will be working on this by myself for a while....but at least I can hold off from remote hosting. I think I will give heroku a try by I dont like the idea of being forced into POSTGRES.....oh well perhaps it won't be too bad. Anyways...I started on the iOS application and it has once again reminded me why I hate objective-c. The syntax/culture is very very frustrating....one doesn't call a method on a class...you message the class. If you are coming from .NET this all seems very silly. Anyways I got my first button to work so I think Im going to call it a night. Tomorrow Im hoping I can figure out how to do controller switching and maybe create a data access layer to my web service.

mySQL Rails3 fail

Apparently I am running into a common problem with Rails 3 and mySQL in that something is wrong with the adapter. I have been trying to get this to work for about 3 hours now and I think Im going to give up for the night. Apparently I can't even use the sqlite adapter now. Perhaps tomorrow will be a bit more productive.

My first iOS and RoR adventure

Soo...its been a while since I have blogged and since Im starting a personal software project I think I am going to give it another shot. If I can make myself blog about its progress then perhaps I will get into the habit of it. My project is a social game of sorts that Im hoping will be fun (for me as the developer and for potential customers). I have been wanting to get into iOS dev and also Ruby on Rails and I feel this is the perfect opportunity to do it. I will be working on this with my dad who is professionally an embedded software developer who has been learning Objective-C on the side. Im hoping this will help me out since he actually has a published application and Im looking at a lot of work for this project....plus I get to write code with my dad....how cool is that.