Mobile Development in Jacksonville, Florida

Last night I participated on a panel with Michael Privat, Satya Komatineni, Dave MacLean, and Henry Lee, moderated by Eugene Chuvyrov. All six of us live in Jacksonville, and we’ve all co-authored books for Apress on mobile technologies:

• Pro Android 3 — Satya Komatineni and Dave MacLean (and Sayed Hashimi, not present)
• Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development — Henry Lee and Eugene Chuvyrov
• Pro Core Data for iOS — Michael Privat and I

Around 25 people showed up for pizza and mobile technology discussions, and I think most people were entertained and enlightened. We talked about the tools, native vs web, languages, difficulty of development, enterprise-ness, cross-platform solutions, and what we thought the future held for the different platforms. We enjoyed a friendly crowd and a friendly panel, and no one pronounced the earth-shaking or the bewildering. Points I can remember from the evening:

• Tools for all the platforms (Android: Eclipse plugin, Windows Phone 7: Visual Studio, iOS: Xcode) are mature and good
• The cloud and the web will play heavily into the future, and web apps may usurp native apps
• Consumers are driving the enterprise — interesting that the best enterprise platform, Blackberry, seems to have the bleakest future
• Cross-platform tools divided the panel — speed of development vs least common denominator
• Although Microsoft clearly lags behind Android and iOS, they could still figure mobile out and get back into a leading position in the mobile space
• The fragmentation of the Android platform can make development difficult
• iOS is the most stable and cohesive platform of the three

You can read about the event at http://jaxarcsig.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/tuesday-may-24th-meeting-mobile-application-development-roundtable-ios-android-wp7/

So, even though the June 2011 edition of Wired magazine omits Jacksonville in its discussion of the resurgent South (pp 132-133) and plops a puny 500 additional jobs over Jacksonville in its “Emerging Epicenters” map (pp 130-131), and even though the radio announced this morning that Jacksonville was named in the top 10 hardest places to find a job, we’re doing some serious mobile development here on the First Coast!