SMARTPHONE DEVELOPMENT

Apple and Google have enjoyed immense success with their smartphone releases, and both companies have battled it out for mobile platform supremacy. With all the good comes some bad, however, and each is fighting separate issues that have made way into their booming app markets.

This second part in a series on developing your first iOS app using Xcode delves into the code of our "Hello World" application.

Market research firm comScore recently released statistics from its MobiLens service that offers insight into the United States’ mobile phone industry. The statistics covered the three-month period ending November 2011, and, as seems to be the case as of late, Android and iOS were the biggest winners.

This tutorial will teach you how to develop your first "Hello World" application for iOS using Xcode.

Mobile apps may be relatively young in terms of how long they have been around, but that is not stopping them from being the king of media when you look at the sheer numbers in which they are being produced. If you are looking for some proof behind such a claim, just consider the fact that developers recently surpassed the one million app milestone across all the major markets from Apple, Android, Windows, and BlackBerry.

The use of incentives that promise gaming points, virtual currency, or other rewards at no cost is a rather clever way to achieve app downloads in the short term, but as a long term method to leave a lasting impression, the use of such incentivized apps is not too effective, at least if you believe some recently published survey results.

Apple may be the current king when it comes to app downloads, but Google’s Android platform is proving to be a strong competitor, as the company announced that its Android Market had surpassed the milestone of 10 billion app downloads. While it took Google 20 months to amass its first billion app downloads, Android’s impressive momentum now has the platform’s app store racking up a billion downloads on a monthly basis with relative ease.

Smartphones equipped with Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich have not yet hit the shelves in the United States, but that has not stopped the CyanogenMod team’s efforts to make Google’s latest operating system a reality for those willing to take a plunge.

Despite the fact that Adobe recently stated it would stop development of its mobile Flash Player, the company has just announced that it has another version in the works that will bring support for the platform to Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich operating system.

The increased functionality and technology that comes packed within smartphones’ compact shells and other portable devices such as tablets is making them more and more of a must-have item amongst consumers. Apps help to amplify a device’s functionality, whether it is for productivity or pleasure. As the tech world becomes crazier for apps, many developers are jumping into the field in an attempt to not only gain recognition, but also financial profit. While most app developers probably have plenty of experience under their belts, some are brand new to the game and very young as well.

Adobe’s decision to abandon future development of its mobile Flash Player is certainly newsworthy, but one has to wonder if the platform will really be missed when all is said and done. BlackBerry PlayBook owners and Android users will feel the effects of the move as future mobile Flash updates for new configurations, operating systems, or browsers will become non existent, but life will surely go on. This becomes especially true when you consider that Flash offers more disadvantages than perks when it comes to the mobile arena.

The tech industry received somewhat of a surprise earlier this week when it was announced that Adobe would discontinue future efforts to develop its beloved Flash multimedia platform for mobile environments. ZDNet reported that some of the mobile versions of Flash that will cease to exist in the future include those for RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, as well as Flash for Android, among others.

RIM’s recent worldwide service outage that put its BlackBerry users out of touch with their handheld devices was a devastating blow to the company’s future prospects, but how much of a deciding factor it becomes still remains to be seen. RIM’s demise was apparently predicted prior to the outage, as surveys painted a not-so bright future for the BlackBerry maker. It could be said, however, that the outage was icing on the cake and enough to push already disgruntled BlackBerry users towards RIM’s competitors.

Android users recently got some good news, as the availability of the NoScript for Firefox add-on was just announced for their mobile platform of choice. The add-on has helped enhance browsing security for Firefox users in a desktop setting in the past, but now has the capability to give users on the go some extra peace of mind as well with version 3.0a8.

Microsoft is apparently dissatisfied with its current place in the smartphone hierarchy, and the company is making moves in an attempt to create a dent in the market share held by iOS and Android. Microsoft’s latest move in conjunction with Nokia is the decision to add Symbian Qt to the Windows Phone API mapping tool to make its platform more appealing to Symbian developers.