Not everything these days is about having that little piece of paper to put on the wall (college degree). A lot of times it’s what you know, and who you know that will help you gain meaningful employment. Some of the best universities are offering their lectures free to the public for viewing and a lot of the course material as well.
Adobe is offering a Free copy of their Flex Builder 3 application for any unemployed developer 
or student.
https://freeriatools.adobe.com/learnflex/
Another great offer comes from Safari Books Online. 60 days free.
In the great debate between Apple hardware and Hackintosh’d systems, I would have to say yes. I have been going round and round trying to get OSX 10.5.6 loaded on my Dell XPS M1330 lately and it is just not fun. I got OSX 10.5.5 installed and working with my wireless network, but I could not properly shutdown, sleep, or reboot the machine. I also didn’t seem to have sound.
Finally after trying to get it running again to start playing around with a new SDK for an upcoming mobile platform, I gave up.
So…
Some of my favorite desktop apps are open source or web based. GIMP, Pidgin, x-chat all get used on a daily basis. Why should we settle for all these different proprietary SDK models that require us to have a certain operating system to develop on. These last couple weeks I’ve explored getting started with the iPhone SDK, and the .NET SDK for developing for Windows Mobile. Honestly . . . Apple and Microsoft have missed the bus.
I feel like I’m beating a dead horse with this java thing, but HTML and JavaScript are well established programming standards. The fine folks over at PhoneGap have put together another tool using HTML and Java to develop apps not just for the iPhone, but for the Android, Blackberry, and most definitely coming soon Pre.
J2ME Polish is a toolkit that allows you to “develop, design, and build your applications on the platform of your choice: Windows, Mac OSX, Linux or any other Java enabled operating system”
This one caught me off guard a bit because you can 1: program in Java, and port your app to Blackberry, Palm, DoJa and WIPI devices. Not only that but Winmo, iPhone and Android platforms are natively supported.
Twitter seems like it is becoming more and more popular these days. Many site now have their own Twitter accounts that let you follow them and get notified when they update the site. We are currently doing that and you can follow the Appdots site at http://www.twitter.com/appdots.
In addition to the site Twitter account, Justin and I can both be found on Twitter with our personal accounts. You can follow me at http://www.twitter.com/brettq. I will let Justin share his Twitter account later. The reason we run both personal and site Twitter accounts is because a lot of people do not like their Twitter feeds to look just like a RSS news feed. There are a lot of accounts out in the twitterverse that do nothing but put out notifications when a new article is posted. This is what our Appdots account is currently doing on Twitter. On the other hand, I use my personal account for a wide variety of things and I also usually retweet notices from Appdots. We will be using the Appdots site for more content in the future and for possible contests, so it is worth it to keep it on follow just in case!
As for Twitter on the go, I am currently using a Palm Treo Pro as my daily driver device and am using PockeTwit as my Twitter client. I also use Tweetie on my iPhone, which I think is still the best Twitter application on any platform, including PC/OSX. There is a lot of room for polished Twitter applications on pretty much every platform, so if social networking is your thing, why not start coding the next great Twitter app?
[Image via PockeTwit]
I ran across an article on Tech Republic listing the top 10 skills that developers will need over the next 5 years. Lets break it down and focus on only the mobile.
The weakened job market, and the poor economy leave a lot of us looking for quick skill sets to hold us over for the next great job. The list on tech republic, and my breakdown of the related skills for mobile programmers will not only ensure that you’re in for the high demand jobs, but you’ll have the skills for the next 5 years.
Justin joked about the Palm OS being the ultimate undying mobile OS. In many ways this is true. For a while now, a company called StyleTap has created a Palm OS emulator that runs on Windows Mobile or Symbian. I was actually very surprised at Palm’s announcement that it was a company other than StyleTap that would be developing the Classic app for WebOS. At the same time, I am glad. I have never had much luck with applications that use large database files on StyleTap. But, this means that now Palm OS applications can be run on Symbian, Windows Mobile (Pro, Classic, and Standard), and now WebOS. That sure is a lot of market availability for a dying OS!
I really think that an application like this is going to be a huge hit (if it is implemented properly), especially since Palm has said that they plan on making tools that will transfer data over from a Palm OS device to the Pre running Classic. There are a ton of medical databases that were made for the Palm OS that are still being supported. This will allow these programs to be available to use on the Pre as soon as it is released.
Is this a long term solution? Of course not. But it will make a lot of users very happy that they can use some of the Palm apps that they have been using for years (and years and years and years…) until their favorite developers start making native applications for WebOS.
And honestly, one of the most played games on my Nintendo Wii is Mario Kart 64. Some things just never get old.
Do you sit down and hit the books, studying every aspect of the project at hand? Do you find some good blog posts that give you a rough outline of what you want to do? Do you learn more from trial and error?
Post some comments about what tools you use to learn and stay competitive.
It’s been a rusty nail hanging on the coffin of the Palm brand. Ever since they moved to Windows Mobile for their devices, people programming for the zombie PALM OS are in luck. It’s been announced that all the legacy code will work on WebOS. Now the only missing link in the Palm plan would be compatibility with Windows Mobile code . . .