Photo by liferfe.

The mobile software market is becoming very exciting, and I’ve been watching with interest. I’ve been learning iPhone development for the last ten months, first with the jailbreak toolchain, and in the last six months with the official SDK. Likewise, I’ve been dabbling with the Android SDK.

Many people have compared the growth of mobile software in the last year to the amazing growth of the early PC era.

One difference from those years, is that mobile software is already mainstream. The “personal computer” took about 20 years to “catch on,” from the introduction of the Apple I in 1977, to the Windows boom of the mid-90s. In contrast, Apple has sold over 10 million iPhones in the last 11 months alone. There are few consumers that aren’t at least aware of the iPhone’s existence. T-Mobile sold about a million Android-powered G1 phones in only one month of pre-sale orders from existing T-Mobile customers. The device can now be ordered online for new and existing accounts, although demand is expected to be very high, causing possible shortages. They claim they can sell another million G1 phones between now and the end of the year.

Another difference is the barrier to entry. Computers cost thousands of dollars in the 1980s, and were not as easy to use and develop for at the beginning. To be a developer back then, you had to be a computer engineer or someone with previous software development experience on mainframes or minicomputers, which at the time was not as widespread knowledge as in these dime-a-dozen-MCSD days. The barrier to entry was very high, economically and educationally. The barrier to entry for iPhone and Android development is very low, with devices available for less than $200 USD. If you already develop software, be it for the web, intranets, or desktops, you already have most of the skills, and a computer with which to develop. So the cost of development tools and training for these platforms is very low, especially for Android. How come it is lower for Android development, you ask?

To develop for the iPhone App Store, you need to already own a Mac with Leopard 10.5.4. So if you don’t have a Mac, that’s an extra expense. With Android, you can use the computer you already have. To put your application on the iPhone App Store, you need to pay $99 USD + tax to Apple and submit your application and say please and cross your eyes and dot your tease (double pun intended, if perhaps lame.) You can sell Android apps from the trunk of your car at a flea market if you want, but to sell them on the Android Market you need to pay $25 USD, although there is no validation or approval process. For either iPhone or Android, you need to buy a device to test on real hardware and make sure things run well.

Of course, you can always develop iPhone software for the iPhone jailbreak community, using the computer you already own, without having to pay anyone a cent, nor having to seek permission. You will still need a device on which to test on, which brings you up to par with Android in terms of barrier to entry. But then you’d be limiting your market to the 20 to 30 % of iPhone users who jailbreak their device. 200,000 – 300,000 and growing is not a bad number of potential users, though. Many of today’s software giants were founded when PC user numbers were much lower.

Anyhow, I digress. My point is that just like I heard the call of the wild and left full-time employment in a Java consulting shop for freelance web work in Rails nearly three years ago, I hear the winds of change and opportunity roaring by. And I want to get my kite out and test the wind.

As you can see, I’ve researched the market. I’m going to cut back on freelance web projects, to start dedicating time to developing a growing stable of ad-supported and for pay mobile apps, for both iPhone and Android. I can bootstrap this effort and support myself for two years on only a small portion of my savings. I believe there is enough growth in the mobile apps market to make back my investment and grow it a little bit. The monetary barrier to entry is so low, the only risk is time and effort lost if things don’t work out. If that happens, I can always go back to what I did before. But I’m not going to forgive myself if I don’t try this.

There will be other related news soon. Meanwhile, enjoy the breeeeezeeeee. Ha ha!

Song “Can You Hear The Wind Blow”, by Whitesnake

I grew up in this very town, 37 miles west of San Juan on the north shore of Puerto Rico. This very house where I live now was my grandfather’s house when I was eight years old. It later became my home, from ages 11 to 17. After graduating from high school, I went to Pennsylvania, PA to study Computer Science and got a job straight out of college. I moved here again almost seven years ago, when the dot com bust left me looking for a job.

I live 5 minutes from the beach, a beautiful bay, in my not so humble opinion.

I loved the beach growing up. I visited the beach every chance I got, even though I didn’t learn to swim properly till I was 16 years old. I just liked to walk the beach, sink my toes in the warm sand, or chill my feet in the water. And my beach has these great hulks of stone nearly three stories high (eolianite according to this page .) I loved climbing them and sitting at the very top and just stare out over the endless stretch of the north Atlantic on the horizon. At different times of the week, you can see the cruise ships heading for the Bahamas or Florida, just a half mile or so from the rocks.

As mentioned at the beginning, after I graduated high school I studied and worked in southeastern Pennsylvania and the North Carolina piedmont for 13 years, several hundred miles from the nearest beach. You can’t imagine the joy I felt every time I returned home on vacation to visit family during those years and stopped to visit this beach. I’m sorry, eastern USA residents, but your beaches are lame. And don’t even get me started about Lake Erie and Lake Michigan. Psh!

For the last two years, I’ve been working from home as a freelance software developer and tech writer. I pretty much can keep my own hours and so I make a point of taking an hour break at least twice in my work week, to head to my beach, just 5 short miles away. There are times I just take the whole weekend away from computers, work, everything (except my iPod and my fiction reading stash.) Sometimes I feel so burned out I just sleep all day on a hammock, less than twenty yards from the breaking waves. The sound of the waves and the steady cool breeze lulls me to sleep every time.

Every year since I moved back here, I ask myself if I want to move back to the USA mainland. And this beach is one of the few reasons I’ve stayed as long as I have.

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I’ve been working with Ruby on Rails for over 18 months now, and it continues to be a lot of fun. There are still challenges, as projects are never a total walk in the park. There is also new stuff to learn almost every week. The Rails team keeps improving the framework, and the community keeps authoring more plugins. Keeping up is a demanding part of the job, but it adds to the fun factor.

One activity I’ve been doing lately on my own time is learning different programming languages, development environments, and frameworks. The move to Rails from Java seems to have been a good choice career-wise, and I did it by trying to keep current on technology. I want to be ready for the next shift, whatever that may happen to be and whenever it comes into prominence.

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After many attempts, I finally had published not just one IT-related article, but three, at IBM DeveloperWorks and Amazon Web Services Developer Portal. The articles were published between late October and late December 2007. They are:

Display Google Calendar events on your PHP Web site with XPath

Don’t Get Caught with Your Instance Down

Using Parameterized Launches to Customize Your AMIs

These articles are just the start of a shift from developing software as one of the faceless multitude of IT geeks, to being somewhat more known among my peers. I hope to turn these and other articles into presentations at software development conferences in 2008. Hopefully this enhanced exposure and networking will lead to great new things in 2008 and beyond.

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Just before beginning this post, I updated WordPress to the latest stable version. I am always amazed by how easy WordPress upgrades are. Considering how easy it is to write unmaintainable crap in PHP, the WordPress team deserves a big standing ovation for doing software right in PHP.

The theme I had up for the last year was not compatible with the change to WordPress 2.3.x, so I picked out a totally different theme this once. It’s really simple and unobtrusive. If I get creative, I may tweak it or pick another theme altogether.

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That’s it for now. I’ll try to post more often. Feel free to give me a nudge in the comments if I let posting to the weblog slide again.

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