Preliminary Considerations

Continued from the previous post...

Cost of Development

There are many costs associated with mobile application development. Each developer would need hardware and software to develop the applications on. The team will need devices to test the software on. And if we want to deploy your application to any public market, then our company would need accounts on the various markets.

Hardware

To develop good mobile apps, We would need an Intel-based Mac because, simply we won’t be able to physically build the iOS implementation of your application without one. The nice thing about the Intel versions of Mac is that you can run Windows on them either virtually.

In addition to the Mac, we might also need multiple monitors. When debugging any application, it is invaluable to step through your source while interacting with the running application. When developing, we have the emulator or simulator running in one monitor, Dev Tool (IDE) running on another and a web browser on another with the documentation for the platform for which we are developing. Having access to all of this information at once prevents context switching for a developer and helps maintain focus. If we are seriously considering mobile development, we need to know that the emulator and simulators are great.

Software

When developing mobile applications there are few overlaps when it comes to software. To develop for iOS we need a Mac, to develop for BlackBerry you need Windows, for Java-based frameworks we need to use Eclipse. Building HTML for PhoneGap can be done in your text editor of choice.

TARGETED FRAMEWORK	SOFTWARE REQUIRED
Windows 7	Windows Phone SDK  Visual Studio Express  Expression Blend for Windows Phone  (Windows only)
iOS	Windows Phone SDK  Visual Studio Express  Expression Blend for Windows Phone  (Windows only)
Android	Eclipse, Android SDK
Blackberry	Eclipse, BlackBerry Plugin, BlackBerry Simulator (only works on  Windows)
Titanium	Titanium Studio, Titanium Mobile SDK  + Android software + iOS software
PhoneGap	PhoneGap Plugin + iOS software (Mac only) + Android software +  Windows Phone 7 software (Windows only)
Any Framework Text Editors	TextMate (Mac)  Notepad++ (Windows)

Table 1. Software needed for development

Licenses & Developer Accounts

To proceed as a developer, we need to create and possess accounts in each platforms as well. For that we need to pay some kind of annual fees.

Documentations & APIs

The respective technologies’ online documentation and APIs should be maintained. This will be the location for the latest information in the respective technology. Resources for these code elements can be found at the respective websites. Sample websites are as follows:
- iOS Documentation: http://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/index.action
- BlackBerry Documentation: http://docs.blackberry.com/en/developers/?userType=21
- Android SDK Documentation:  http://developer.android.com/guide/index.html

Summary

The total cost attribute to create, maintain, and distribute mobile applications for all the platforms would be around a few thousand dollars just for the minimum infrastructure. Given the opportunity to expand this more I would upgrade the laptop to a MacBook Pro, with plenty of RAM, and upgrade the hard disk drive (HDD) to a solid-state drive (SSD). By making these upgrades you will incur a higher initial cost.