Mobile Development week

Last week a colleague of mine alerted me to some free local workshops for educators.  Initially I saw the first week's workshops and thought that they might be too basic for me, but luckily another co-worker pointed out that Week 2 had some mobile development workshops - I guess the lesson here is to never judge a set of workshops by the first week!

In any case, since mobiMOOC was a recent occurrence and since our department has pointed to mobile as something we ought to have now (not five years from now), I thought it would be time well spent.  So Tuesday is a day dedicated to iPhone app development; Wednesday is Windows Phone 7 development and Thursday is Android day. Next week is mobile browser app development.  It's been a number of years (I count close to 10) since I last coded anything but HTML (and possibly SQL) and I honestly didn't think I'd be coding again given the jobs I've had, but I am really looking forward to getting a primer on developing for these three mobile platforms and then following up with something like the Stanford course on iPhone app development.

The one bummer, I recently discovered, was that Xcode is now a paid product.  I remember getting MacOS X and Xcode was included with it, now you either need a developer license ($99 per year) or you buy xcode from the app store.  Sure, it's only $5, but it is a small barrier to entry. It seems like Stanford is using Eclipse as their development platform - personally I think I'll spending the $5 for Xcode :-)

Let's see how this week progresses.

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