Creating your first Mobile Device Application

Amateur developers and coders are often intimidated with the various issues surrounding the development of apps for mobile devices. Luckily, the advanced technology that’s available to us today makes it relatively easy in developing mobile applications. This post focuses on how to create a mobile app from a wide range of mobile platforms.

Developing a mobile application

How do you develop your first mobile application? The first thing you have to look at here is the size of the deployment that you are aiming to create and the platform that you want to use. In this post, we are going to talk about developing mobile applications for the smart phones.

Developing applications for smart phones

Developing apps for smart phones is similar to Windows Mobile devices, but you have to understand your device first. Smart phones have similar features to PDAs, so they have send and end button features. The ‘back’ key is used for backspace and browser back functions.

The best thing about this device is the soft key, which you can program it. You can set this feature to create multiple functions. The central button also acts as an “Enter” button.

Note: You have to install Smartphone 2003 SDK to write smart phone applications using Visual Studio .NET 2003.

What if the smart phone has a touch-screen?

This is the difficult part, in the absence of button controls in a touch-screen handheld device, you will have to choose alternate controls, such as the menu. Visual Studio gives you a ‘Main Menu’ control, which is customizable. But too many top-level menu options will cause the system to crash. What you can do is to create few top-level menus and give a variety of options under each one of them.

Developing apps for BlackBerry smart phones

Developing apps for the BlackBerry OS is a big business today. For developing a BlackBerry app, you will have to possess:

• The BlackBerry JDE Plug-in for Eclipse
• BlackBerry simulator
• BlackBerry smart phone and data cable
• JAVA programming knowledge

Eclipse works great with JAVA programming. A new project, filed with a .COD extension, can be directly loaded to the simulator. You can also test the app by loading it through Device Manager, or by using the “JAVAloader” command line option.

Note: Not all BlackBerry APIs will work for all BlackBerry smart phones. So note the devices that accept the code.

What’s next?

After you have learnt to develop a basic mobile device application, you should carry on and try to improve your knowledge. You should:

• Be active in developer forums and discussions
• Enroll in learning labs, both online and offline. This will give you more tips and tricks on creating varied applications.
• View online video tutorials on building apps across various mobile platforms.