Mobile development strategies

####General dump of notes taken during the session - no particular rhyme or reason to them

• Slightly over half of the people in the session were already doing some kind of Mobile development.

• Steroids does more native integration over PhoneGap. Wanted to capitalise on html5 knowledge rather than native languages. You can do smart stuff to mitigate against perf hits.

• Ruby motion – native to iOS accessed via ruby as opposed to objective C. Syntax was better for Ruby. Really good community around it. Wrappers are developed by ruby devs – better api’s.

• If you want to do multiple platforms the Xamarin would be a better choice. C# isn’t messaged based. Going from objective C to ruby is easier than c# to objective c.

• The mobile market is about advertising now. It’s all about getting your game to eye balls.

• Business apps are for supporting existing business model.

• Native vs Hybrid – if you need perf you go native. You go hybrid if hardware integration isn’t reeeeally important. Derek has documentation on how to make the right decision. There’s a lot of things to think about.

• ‘If you can get away from Native, you should’ – 2 people agreed.

• You do get perf improvement if you can host on the device rather than download it on the web.

• Phonegap is a way for web apps to interact with the phone hardware.

• There are ways to work with phonegap to make it look like a native app.

• If you go hybrid you have 1 code base but with lots of edge cases.

• Netflix are hybrid. Run one code base for all device types. It’s all custom built – no off the shelf stuff like PhoneGap.

• Top coat – Adobe’s UI design tool that works with PhoneGap.

• Icenium – big push on visual studio integration. Works with Git. Want to help .net devs to get into hybrid mobile development. Just released cordova 3 support. Also looking at own plug in system to make it easier. They integrate web kit (dev tools) into the ide’s. 3 ide’s mist, graffite and vs.