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:

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!

2 Responses

  1. Patrick Barger says:

    I am looking for someone to possibly develop a smart phone application for my company can you help?

  2. Rob Warner says:

    Thanks for the interest. Unfortunately, I’m pretty much tapped out these days.

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